Edible Apple

With over 50,000 apps currently on iTunes, small developers are increasingly having a difficult time getting their apps noticed. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch feels that a genius feature, similar to the one used for music on iTunes, would be a workable solution to that growing problem.

At its most simple level, it could probably work like this: Say there’s an app that you downloaded and really like, Apple should be able to recommend other apps of a similar genre you might like based on what others’ downloading habits are. But Apple could probably go much deeper than that and see which apps you use (or at least launch) the most, and use that as a basis for these recommendations as well. And it could also use the star rating system it already has in place as another point of recommendation — though it should probably make it easier to rate apps from within iTunes if it does that.

While such a system may not be perfect, it would be much better than the current system of app discovery through iTunes, which really isn’t too fair to little developers.

Interesting.  But if most people download the same subset of apps, would a genius feature really be able to find ‘hidden gems’?  Also, I think recommending apps is a much tougher task than recommending music.

What do you guys think?  Hit us back in the comments below.