There are more than 1.4 million mobile applications in Apple’s App Store. This is a good thing for Apple’s customers, because the choices are practically endless. This is also a bad thing for Apple’s customers, because the choices are practically endless.
Unless you have a good idea of what you’re looking for, it can be tough to stumble upon novel, surprising items among Apple’s sprawling garden of apps.
Pinterest, the popular social bookmarking start-up, thinks it has a fix for this. The company is unveiling a new product on Thursday that could make it easier for people to discover new smartphone apps without even having to go into Apple’s App Store.
The product, called App Pins, aims to do the same thing for smartphone apps that Pinterest’s service has done for photos, recipes and many other types of websites. In short, the service is a type of digital corkboard that lets visitors save, or “pin,” items they like or places they want to go.
Pinterest’s philosophy is that it can help nudge people into doing things — be it buying a coffee maker or trying a new recipe — by letting the site’s 70 million estimated regular visitors search for and save for later the things that interest them. If I’m looking to buy a good espresso machine, for instance, I could head over to La Marzocco’s website and pin a link to the $7,000 GS/3 to my Pinterest board to buy it later.
That same philosophy goes for smartphone apps. I could search for “health” on Pinterest and come across a fitness app that I may want to download. With App Pins, it takes only a few taps to download the app directly to my phone, without ever having to leave Pinterest to do so.
“We can be a really powerful service for app discovery, which is a problem that still really hasn’t been solved,” Evan Sharp, a founder of Pinterest, said in an interview. “Our specialty is really connecting people to the things they want to do.”
The pairing, which is currently exclusive with Apple’s iOS apps, and not Google’s Android apps, is not without precedent. Facebook says it helps millions of people discover apps in its News Feed, and last year, Twitter gave small developers the ability to promote their apps on the service.
Pinterest believes it is better positioned to help promote apps because of the nature of the service. People come to Pinterest, the company says, to find new things to do, see and buy. That is unlike Facebook, which has been used to connect with friends, or even Twitter, which is often about public discourse and news.
In addition, more than 75 percent of Pinterest’s use comes from mobile users, a crowd more able and willing to download new apps.
It is also a significant move for Apple, which has long surfaced popular smartphone apps via the “featured” section of its App Store. If an app is placed in Apple’s featured section, which is carefully curated by Apple employees, it is much more visible than the hundreds of thousands of other apps in the company’s gigantic repository.
In the past, Apple has had some difficulty with providing adequate app search to its customers, and has made several moves to better surface apps. In 2012, Apple bought Chomp, an app search company, and it has also introduced a host of new features to the app store ace apps, including a menu that shows which apps are trending in popularity at the moment, and also gave users the ability to search by categories and sub-categories of apps.
Along with Pinterest’s App Pins initiative, Apple will introduce its own curated App Store account on Pinterest, featuring multiple boards on the service on Thursday; it will use its in-house team to promote apps that will vary by season, theme and even the choices of so-called “guest pinners.”
Apple also has an App Store Twitter account, which has close to 3.5 million followers, as well as an App Store Facebook Page, which is liked by more than 11 million people.
Pinterest said it did not yet have any plans to make money directly from App Pins. However, if Pinterest aims to follow in the footsteps of other social networks, App Pins could be significant for Pinterest’s business.
Like Facebook and Twitter, which offer paid app advertising products, the new Pinterest product could, in time, be a way for developers to promote their applications across the social network.