‘Appreciate’ for Android Fails to Deliver Valuable App Recommendations

With more than 700,000 Android apps available in the Google Play store, it’s not always easy to find software you truly appreciate. The free Appreciate Android app has an “app news feed” that’s designed to give you recommendations and help you find software that’s worthy of your gadget’s storage space.

Appreciate serves up “great Android apps just for you, based on what you actually like and use, and what your Facebook friends, and mega-users of apps you’re interested in, like and recommend for you,” according to its description on Google Play.

The reality? Appreciate’s recommendations are uninspiring and even clueless, at least in my experience. Here are some examples of recommendations, ranging from “so-so” to “say what?”

• Go SMS Pro WP8 Popup, a free app that provides random colors to change “for your phone.” Why Appreciate recommended it for me: “We think you’ll appreciate it.” 
• Quadrant’s Standard, a CPU, I/O, 3D graphics benchmark app, was recommended because “it’s a men’s favorite.”
• Akhbaar 24, an Arabic news app, was also recommended simply because “we think you’ll appreciate it.” I don’t speak or write Arabic; I have never been to that part of the world; and I don’t know anyone there. So why would I be interested in that app?

None of the 12 apps Appreciate recommended were interesting to me. Nor did I find an option to tell the app things I am interested in, so it could serve up better recommendations.

Tapping a link in each app description takes you to Google Play so you can download the software. Appreciate also shows you others who have downloaded a recommended app, the apps they use, and how compatible you are supposed to be with those users. You can also see apps that are similar to the recommended downloads. And Appreciate delivers new recommendations every day.

Appreciate is free, so it might be worth downloading to see if you get better recommendations than I did. Or you could just download the free AppBrain app, which, in my experience, does a much better job recommending Android apps based on the software installed on your device.