The iTunes store apparently has around 65,000 applications in it these days – an impressive number, to be sure. But with that sort of scale (and even at a tenth of that scale) comes a real challenge around application discovery. The iPhone 3GS can show up to 176 applications on its 11 home screens (that’s up a couple of screens and therefore a couple of dozen applications from the 3G version), so there’s a huge mismatch there in terms of how many apps are available versus how many you can put on your phone in a usable fashion.

But the bigger issue is how to find useful and relevant new applications. How I discovered the ones I have on my iPhone:

• I searched for them (i.e. I already knew roughly what I wanted)
• They were profiled on the front page of the App Store
• They were covered by one of the blogs I frequent
• They are extensions of services I’m already using.

Those four methods have worked well but they’re limited. What if a genius somewhere comes up with an application that’d be perfect for me but it doesn’t get covered in the blogs, doesn’t get highlighted on the App Store, isn’t connected to any service I’m already using, and serves a need I don’t know I have? That’s not that far fetched. Even when you do know what you want – the first of my four scenarios – finding what you want in the app store is tough, because there’s so much clutter in there. Scrolling through multiple pages of app logos (with no indication of what they do) gets tiresome quickly. There are 86 pages of “Productivity” apps in the App Store, and that includes (just on the first page) everything from a wind chime app to help you get to sleep to a database application to an app for keeping track of the movies you own. It’s overwhelming and it’s not likely to help you find what you need unless you know the name of it already. Ratings don’t help, because only apps that get used a lot have enough ratings to be assigned an overall rating, so the obscure apps that might be helpful don’t benefit.

Someone on TechCrunch suggested that the App Store needs a genius feature, akin to what’s available for music. That’s probably not a bad idea: it could even be a really simple format similar to the Amazon “people who bought this also liked this” feature and it would probably be helpful. But I think there’s always going to be a problem with the sheer number of apps in the App Store, which raises the question of what a useful number might be. A tenth of the current number – around 5-10,000 – seems about right. It’s certainly far more than Palm currently has in its Pre app store, but much less than the rapidly growing iTunes App Store.

In the meantime, I guess we’ll have to keep relying on whatever mediocre tools are out there. One I’ve come across recently is a feed that lists the latest apps added to the store. It’s a little overwhelming too – no filters to weed out the trash from the good stuff (and there does seem to be an awful lot of trash). But it’s another way to slice the data. There are some more tools listed here. But overall it feels like a lost cause, and a lot more about luck than quality when you do run across something worthwhile.

Footnote:

Two of my recent favorites are (with iTunes links):

• Prowl – an extender for the Mac notification system Growl, which allows you to push notifications to your iPhone for various events on your Mac, such as new Twitter messages via Tweetie, or IM messages from Adium. Apple’s push notification servers seem to have been playing up a fair bit recently, but when it works it’s pretty effective. It would have been nice to try this out before buying, but at $2.99 I figured it wasn’t too much of a risk. It would be nice, though, if more paid apps gave you a day or so to try them out before forking over money.
• Reqall – a great to-do app I used once long ago through the web version and forgot about. The new iPhone version is very nifty, and if you upgrade to the Pro account online it does clever things with locations too. Much cheaper and for my money just as good as many of the full-featured desktop Mac to do lists.

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