Apple kills Genius and replaces it with Near Me

Apparently there are something like 900,000 apps in the iOS App Store, but how many can you find on your iPhone or iPad? There are some in the Featured section and there are Top charts. In each of these two sections you can choose a category from around a dozen or so. Add up all the apps you can find and I bet they won't come to much more than a thousand. There are another 899,000 somewhere in the App Store, but it is a mystery how to find them. There certainly aren't any facilities in iOS to help you.

Of course, there is a search facility that can be used to find apps, but you really have to know what you are looking for and searching for 'photo editor' or 'social networking' doesn't really help. You might as well browse the top 50 in those categories.

I often don't know what I am looking for. I just want to see what's new, I just want to see some amazing apps, I want to be surprised, but discovering apps isn't high on Apple's list of priorities. There is Genius of course, and this does help a bit. It suggests new apps based on apps you have downloaded before. However, the list of apps it produces is very limited. You'll get 20 suggestions in a category and that's it. There are still 899,000 apps out there.

What I would really like is a list of apps that can be sorted by date, name, downloads, category and rating. This would enable you to see what's new today or this week, to see the highest rated, the most downloaded and so on. Apple simply doesn't provide these facilities and Genius is a very limited way to discover apps. Perhaps this is why Apple has abandoned it in iOS 7.

Look at the screen shot below (from Apple's iOS 7 features page). Where genius used to be at the bottom is Near Me. When you are out with your iPhone you can tap the Near Me button to see apps related to places near you, like art galleries and so on. Under certain circumstances this can be very useful, but when you are having a coffee break at work or sitting at home playing with your phone, it is useless. Won't it show the same apps every single time?

We spend a lot of time at home or sitting in offices or doing the same tasks and  this means Near Me just isn't very interesting. I know what's near my house or my office thank you very much. I can see Near Me being useful maybe once a month or when I am on holiday. It is not something I can use every day to discover new apps, so those 899,000 apps will go unnoticed.

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I recently came across an interesting app called App Roulette that can help you to discover new apps. It is no substitute for a decent App Store listing with sortable results, but it can be fun to use.

App Roulette is nothing to do with gambling and what it does is to compare the apps on your iPhone with a random person's iPhone. The screen shot above right shows the result - 49 apps on my phone, 102 on someone else's. It is completely anonymous so you don't know who it is and there is no way to find out. You don't need to know who it is or where they are, just what apps are installed

It shows we have 20 apps in common, such as Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, but also 82 apps I don't have. Tap the 82 and it switches to list mode and displays a list of all the apps with prices and links to the App Store. You can repeat this with any number of random people and it is an interesting way to discover new apps. Someone else may have discovered a great app you don't have and you can check it out and see whether it is something you might like.

You can run App Roulette at any time and the results are always different. I find it an interesting and unique way to discover apps I either never knew about or perhaps have seen in the store, but not bothered to install. Seeing it on someone else's phone is an indication that it might be worth having.