StumbleUpon launches App Discovery on Android, trips over clumsy interface

StumbleUpon’s been serving up crowdsourced, personalized website recommendations since the turn of the century with the simple idea that like-minded surfers will enjoy the same stuff, and if that sounds like a fantastic formula for recommending apps, then you’re in a spot of luck. StumbleUpon’s bringing App recommendations to Android today as part of an update to its app, and we have to say, the program’s got some potential if it catches on. As with all crowdsourced software, StumbleUpon’s not terribly good at its job right off the bat and a moderately unresponsive UI (with tiny touchscreen buttons) doesn’t really help, but the app presently pulls from a set of existing Android app databases that give it a nice head start. After you log in with your StumbleUpon ID, it asks you if it can (a la AppBrain) take a look at the existing apps on your phone, after which point it displays likely correlations one by one (complete with descriptions, screenshots and Android Market star ratings) for you to vote up or down. We got quite a few flashlights, soundboards and fart machines, mind you, but most everything we saw had plenty of ratings and at least four stars, and a good number of our favorites (and some probable soon-to-be-favorites) popped up as well, and voting up and down app concepts is an amusing diversion in and of itself. Sadly, it doesn’t use your existing StumbleUpon topic preferences to recommend apps, but it will hopefully align them to your tastes soon, assuming that enough folks can look past the iffy UI long enough to help their fellows and give the free app a go. PR after the break. Update: It’s on the Android Market right now — find it at our source link, or use the handy-dandy QR code at right. Gallery: StumbleUpon App Discovery for Android Continue reading StumbleUpon launches App Discovery on Android, trips over clumsy interface StumbleUpon launches App Discovery on Android, trips over clumsy interface originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on November 4, 2010. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry