AppRecommender – Intelligent App Distribution Towards an Optimised App Discovery, is a research project to develop technologies capable of offering the right app to the right user at the right time, thus optimising the current app distribution and discovery services, allowing companies to get closer to their target customers (download our poster).
Motivation
Critical importance of having a mobile solution to be in contact with their targeted audience.
Massive competition among apps.
– Google Play Store: +2.8 million apps (2017),
– Apple App Store: +2.2 million apps (2017),
– Portuguese Aptoide: +1 million apps
300 billion apps expected to be downloaded in 2020. However, many apps downloaded are never used and, in 77% of the cases, apps are never used again 72 hours after the installation.
Considerable misalignment between the apps offered by the app stores and the finding of the right app from the consumers according to their needs (discovery).
Gartner predicted that less than 0.01% of mobile developers had commercial success by the end of 2018, due to this misalignment and the massive competition among mobile apps.
52% of the apps are discovered through word-of-mouth, and only 40% are discovered using app store’s digital services.
These inefficiencies make the distribution and discovery of apps a considerable and important challenge on an industry with massive penetration in societies that is still growing fast.
Goal
Research and develop technologies capable of offering the right app to the right user at the right time, optimizing thus the current app distribution and discovery services, and allowing companies to get closer to their target customers.
Approach
Develop a fusion-based recommender system and a semantic search engine.
Impact
The project aims to have impact on the mobile app consumers, mobile app publishers and on the Aptoide app store, though Caixa Mágica, current lead promoter of this project that will bring the results to the market.
For the consumers, the impact will be in the ease of use, efficiency and satisfaction in the discovery of apps, because of the improved alignment between their needs, characteristics and context with the apps offered by the app store.
For developers and companies that promote mobile apps, the impact will be in the improved proximity to their targeted audience, optimizing the user acquisition and retention, and inherently the commercial success.
For Caixa Mágica and Aptoide, the impact will be on the optimized quality of service provided to consumers and companies, and in the consequent increase of the number of apps submitted to the store, active users and revenue.
Diagram
