How on Earth have I been missing out on this app for so long! Go check it out, it's free on the Market!
Discover New Android Applications With AppAware
By Frank McPherson on Feb 22, 2010 08:14 PM
One of the knocks against the Android Market is that it is difficult to discover new applications. The Market lists Featured Applications on the top page, but beyond that you have to start drilling down through a list of application categories to see a list of the top paid and top free applications. AppAware is a program that lists the Android applications that have been installed in the last several minutes, and shows the top applications installed in the last hour, day, and week.
After you start the program you see a list of applications that have been recently installed by AppAware users who are contributing to the stream of information. Application names are displayed in blue, green, and red. Blue applications have more installations than removals, red applications have more removals than installations, and green applications have about the same installations and removals. If you tap the application name, a screen displays showing the details behind the colors, and you also see a button that you can tap to open the application in the Android Market.
If you chose to, you can have AppAware post Twitter notifications about your application activities. You will need to configure AppAware to login to Twitter in order for this to happen, and the feature can be turned off. The application monitors all activity with the Android Market and will tweet those changes even if AppAware is not running, so be sure to turn off this feature if you don't want this activity broadcasted on Twitter. For an example of what is shown on Twitter run a Twitter search on #AppAware.
You should also be aware that your Market activity is also sent to AppAware, which is how it displays on the application's main screen. The information is published on the application's web site and published in an RSS feed. If you do not want to share your activity with AppAware, you can turn off your contributions in the program settings, but doing so means your activity will not count in AppAware's rankings.
On AppAware's home screen you can tap a button to list the Top Applications installed, updated, and removed in the last hour, day, and week. For example, by running the application I have learned that the top installed application this week is DroidBooster, which is a benchmarking application to test improvements of Java optimization by the developer. Not surprisingly, DroidBooster is also the most removed application since it is the type of application you try a few times and then remove.
Some people may not be comfortable with the social networking and information sharing features of AppAware, but fortunately the application provides easy ways for turning the features off. I have found the program provides an interesting way to discover new Android applications, so for now it will remain on my T-Mobile myTouch 3G. However, my Twitter followers will be happy to know that after a brief bit of experimentation I turned off the Twitter notification feature of the application
http://www.mediabistro.com/mobilecontenttoday/android/discover_new_android_applications_with_appaware_152853.asp?c=rss
2 comments:
Looks like a very useful app. I just installed so it will be fun to watch.
Mike
Yeah I got yelled at for spamming though on Twitter so I turned of the Twitter announce.
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