More on my favorite iOS apps. Another post about meta-apps (apps that assist you in finding more apps).
With these I’d suggest you start with the AppStart (the free one) and see if you like the advice. If so, consider buying AppAdvice, which costs $1.99 and is a news portal specifically about iOS apps.
AppStart has a sort of vintage look and feel and is built well for the iPad navigational paradigm. You tap on icons you want to look further at, swipe up and down to scroll down and up, swipe to the right to get back to the start menu screens (which you can swipe up and down to navigate through). Tap the orange Free/price buttons to be taken to the app’s page in the App Store.
As for AppStart’s quality of advice, I found it to be about 60% – 80% accurate for my needs in app-land. I do get the sense that both AppStart and AppAdvice expect me, in their guides, to be made of money. They keep advising me to buy the $25 – $50 apps for specific purposes (like Omnifocus, for instance). I tend to just discard that notion unless there’s something really specific I want an app for. I think the most I’ve spent on a single app so far is $16, and that was for Quickoffice. More on that one in a future post.
AppAdvice is more of an apps and accessories news portal. It also provides App Guides, which are helpful short reviews of a certain class of apps (e.g. Tax Apps for the iPhone, Apps To Replace Your Native Camera, Moon Phase Apps). Another category of suggestions it provides are AppLists, for instance “Photographer’s Kit” or “Truly Addictive iOS Games”. Like AppStart, navigation is good. Scroll horizontally to scroll through categories of lists or guides. Click on new items to zoom into them. Click “Back to Index” to go back to the top level category you’re in. There’s also the option to mail the review to a friend.
I bought this app partly because I approved of the service AppAdvice.com provides and wanted to help support it and partly directly because of the quality of its reviews. It seems a pretty professional outfit and like with AppStart, I’ve found AppAdvice’s advice to be more helpful than not. They tend to provide useful additional information that I’m not going to get consistently in the reviews for apps in the App Store or on the wild internet.
In combination with the App Store and the AppShopper app I reviewed last time, I feel like I have a good bead on the apps available for iOS and have a fighting chance not to be cheated by a scam or a bad purchase of an app on iOS. I wish I had such options available on Android, honestly.
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