Let's face it: browsing the Android Market on your desktop currently sucks. For one thing, there aren't any categories - just "Top Free" and "Top Paid." For another, there's no search!

On your phone, the situation isn't much better - you can search, which is good if you know what you're looking for in advance but you still can't filter those results. And discovering new apps is just downright horrible.

This is where sites like AppBrain come in. They spider the Android Market, slice and dice it, and provide better ways of finding your next favorite app.

New Features

Today, AppBrain released a new version of the site, making finding new apps even more powerful. Utilizing anonymous statistics, AppBrain now lets you filter in more ways than before, and in more ways than any other Market scraper we know:

most popular in a certain country

most popular among men, women, youngest people, people in their 20s, 30s, and older

hot today

hot this week

all-time popular

top rated

recommended for you

free, paid, new, updated, price reduced

Not all of the above features are new, but we included everything, so that you can get the big picture. Not all of the above features are new, but we included everything, so that you can get the big picture.

Check out the new menu:

The AppBrain hot apps list is a big step in the right direction, but we think browsing for apps could be even better. In addition to a cleaner user interface, it features much better ways in which you can browse for Android apps. By using anonymous aggregated user statistics, we are able to provide a number of interesting new ways to browse for apps. For instance, you can now look for apps from the tools category that are popular among the youngest users of AppBrain, and find a Drivers Ed app. Or find out that there's three Hello Kitty themes in the top 10 popular themes among women. We also made it much easier to find apps that are interesting to people from a specific country. I was happy to now easily find the “Albert Heijn” application from the list of apps most used in the Netherlands, where I’m from. The 15 countries we currently provide most-used lists for are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Hong Kong, Brazil, France, Canada, Spain, and Portugal. Other countries unfortunately don’t have enough users on AppBrain to provide a ranking, but we will add more countries as soon as more people join! In addition to the new lists, we also enhanced the ways you can filter the selection of apps down to what you want. For instance, the hot apps are now viewable by category, by clicking them on the left side of the screen. In addition to filtering by category, you can also add a filter to only get free, paid, new, updated, or price-reduced apps.

Oh, and just in case you didn't know, AppBrain also lets you install apps directly from their site and onto your handset, as well as maintain automated lists of all installed apps on all your devices:

Google, are you listening? Save yourself the trouble and hire these guys, will ya?

Source: AppBrain Blog