Android Tapp is an excellent review site for Android Apps. A typical review there shows nice large screenshots, goes through the pros and cons of the app, and gives you both a user-rating as well as an Android Tapp staff rating.

Now, you can find links to Android Tapp reviews right here on AppsVu search results. If any of the apps on your search results have been reviewed on Android Tapp previously, you’ll find a little link saying [review] right next to the [market] and [QR Code] links all the way to the right of each result. This is what it looks like:

You can see this feature on three of the results for [Streaming radio]. There’s still some work to be done, but this should be plenty helpful right off the bat. Obviously, the vast majority of the 20,000+ apps on the Android Market haven’t been hand reviewed, so you’ll find these links on select apps only.

The feature is still in beta and more sites will be added moving forward.

The link color on the search results is now much darker. The earlier ones had a washed out look. The increase in contrast should mean people searching from their Android phones no longer have to squint to see the results.

Please continue offering awesome feedback.

The Android Market search on AppsVu now caches search results, so you should see a healthy speed improvement for most popular queries.

You may have noticed some changes to the filters and sort options in the left sidebar of the search results page.

You can now mix and match filters and sort options. Now you can find Paid Streaming Radio apps sorted by Popularity and other such combinations.

Also new is the “Quality Filter”. Basically, a “Quality” app in this filter is defined as any app that has a rating equal to or better than 3.5 Stars, and has been rated by 100 or more users, and has been downloaded by at least 500 people. An App passes the Quality Filter only if it satisfies all three conditions above.

The Quality Filter basically removes the crud and almost guarantees that you will not be disappointed by an app that passes the filter. Sure, it may not suit your tastes, but a “Quality” app won’t have something fundamentally wrong with it.

It won’t be surprising if most users start defaulting to enabling the Quality Filter in most of their searches.

You’ll notice that every search result on AppsVu has a link to the right labelled “[QR Code]”. On clicking it, you’ll find a small new browser window popup with a squigly picture on it, like this:

“QR Code” stands for “Quick Response Code” and was developed by a Japanese company called Denso-Wave back in 1994. A QR Code is a type of barcode, except that it uses two-dimensions instead of just one in a standard barcode.

QR Codes can contain arbitrary types of information, including physical and email addresses, prices, and URLs.

So what does all this have to do with your shiny new Android phone? Well, a QR Code can also contain a link to specific apps or categories on the Android Market. So when you point your Android device’s camera at a QR Code, special software can “read” the QR Code and execute specific actions. There are many Android apps out there that can read QR Codes.

The QR Code pictured above has instructions to tell your Android phone to open the Android Market application and go to the Pandora Radio app. Other codes can perform a search on the Market, or pull up a specific category, and so on.

To read QR Codes with your Android phone, you will need:

1. An Android phone with a camera
2. A QR Code scanning app. A good app to start with is Barcode Scanner.
3. A QR Code!

That’s it. When you see a QR Code, just do the following:

1. Launch the Barcode Scanner app (or equivalent)
2. Point your camera at the QR Code (even if the code is on your computer’s screen)
3. Wait

The Barcode Scanner app will automatically detect the QR Code and execute the relevant action. If you do this with the QR Code pictured above, you’ll see that the Market app is launched and the Pandora Radio app is pulled up.

Happy Scanning!

The left sidebar on any AppsVu search contains filtering options with which you can narrow down your search results:

These filters are present on all searches with a reasonable number of results. Clicking on a particular filter will highlight the selection. Once any filter is clicked (enabled) a new option pops up: “All (clear)” which will clear all filters and take you back to an unfiltered search.

AppsVu now does stemming for Android search. Results are now much more comprehensive, and there’s a much higher chance that any given query will show results.

Here’s what a typical result on an AppsVu Android search looks like:

In this post, I’ll go through what each component does.

1. The big “Pandora Radio” link in blue goes to the Pandora Radio description page on AndroLib.com, which is a mirror of the Android Market.
2. The smaller [Cyrket] link, also in blue, goes to the Pandora Radio description page on Cyrket.com, which is another mirror of the Android Market. It has a cleaner and different interface.
3. The [market] link on the right is for those of you who are surfing from your Android phone. Clicking on it will launch the Market app on your smartphone and take you to the Pandora Radio app page.
4. The [QR Code] link will launch a small new browser window with a nice big QR Code on it. You can use Barcode Scanner or any other QR Code scanning app to read it by pointing your Android phone’s camera at it. This action will automatically launch the Market app and pull up the Pandora Radio page.
5. The 5 Star rating comes from the Android Market rating for Pandora Radio.
6. The (Free) in braces and bolded text is where you’ll see the price of the app.
7. The rest of the text is pulled from the Android Market description of the app, usually the first few lines.

Note that the results are structured for easy and quick decision making. The name of the app, rating, and price are all clustered close together so you can quickly decide whether an app is worth investigating further or not. Also, the price and ratings for all the results are vertically aligned, so you can quickly scan through the search results and pick the ones that pass your own mental filters.

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