Yahoo has launched new mobile apps for iOS and Android which are designed to make it easier to sift through the enormous list of available apps to find the ones you’re looking for. While Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market let you sort by category or search by name, Yahoo goes a few steps further by offering tools that make it easy to find apps if you don’t know the name or even what you’re looking for in the first place.
The home screen features top picks in a few categories such as Entertainment, Games, and Music. You can tap any of the featured apps to view screenshots, a description, reviews, and a link to related apps. The download button will take you to the App Store or Android Market.
You can also click the category name to see a list of free, paid, or all apps in that category.
But things get really interesting when you start typing in the search box at the top of the screen. You can search by category, name, or description such as “kids games.” As soon as you start typing, search results will appear with apps matching your query at the top of the screen, followed by suggested searches.
I’m not all that impressed with the personalized app suggestions on the home page, but I do really like the search feature.
Since the results change with each new letter you enter, you can keep refining your search based on the suggestions. Honestly, this is the sort of feature I would have expected to see Google bring to the Android Market, since Google offers suggestions and instant results for mobile and desktop web searches. But it’s good to see Yahoo filling a void… although I wonder whether AppSpot will offer new features if and when Google and Apple decide to steal the idea for their own app stores.
Yahoo AppSpot is available as a free download from the App Store and Android Market. Yahoo also offers a web-based version of its app search engine.
