Related Articles
The new Apptitude app for the iPhone wants to help you sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to finding other apps. That’s good news — there are more than 350,000 apps now available for the iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store, so finding the best new ones is a challenge. That’s particularly true at the moment, when every other new app seems to be a rubbish Charlie Sheen soundboard.
Apptitude is the latest app-recommendation app to be released on the App Store. It’s free to download, and lets you discover apps based on what your Facebook friends are using on their iOS devices.
You log in using your Facebook ID, which is a speedy process if you’ve already got the Facebook app running in the background on your iPhone. The idea is that Apptitude pulls down data from Facebook status updates and Likes, and then sorts them into a feed showing what your mates are currently using.
It’s a good idea, because it means those friends don’t need to be using Apptitude themselves for their apps to show up. That said, it also means the recommendations are passive rather than active — your friends aren’t deciding to tell you a particular app is awesome, but rather you’re just seeing what they’ve been using recently.
You can use Apptitude itself more actively, though, choosing to share details of any app on your iPhone, with a comment on why you like it. You also have the ability to tag friends as if an app were a Facebook photo.
As we said, Apptitude is a good idea, but one that feels like it could do with some work. On our iPhone 4, we noticed the odd graphical glitch — text at the bottom of the screen running over a Like button for example, as shown in the screenshot above.
We spotted the odd piece of text saying ‘(null)’ too, which is generally a sign that some code’s gone awry. Oh, and Apptitude thinks 32,395 of our Facebook friends use the Twitter app for iPhone. We can only dream of being so popular.
For now, existing recommendation apps like Appsfire, Chomp and newcomer Explor offer a more polished experience. Still, if Apptitude developer NoiseToys brings out updates quickly, with new features and glitch fixes, the app could be a contender — at least until Apple finally gets its bottom into gear and brings Facebook-fuelled recommendations to the App Store itself.
