The App Store for iOS and Mac is a great place to find new apps for your Apple devices, but their search algorithms are not the best. iTunes doesnât have advanced search features, and many people donât care about software at all. Fortunately, you donât âfightâ with iTunes to browse and search the App Store.
Not many people know this, but Appleâs official website gives you a way to browse the iOS and Mac app stores. You can check out various subcategories, such as Books, Games and Productivity, to see the most popular applications in these categories, or go to the alphabetical list of applications in each category.
However, that can tire you out quickly, and the official site doesnât have a powerful enough app search feature like Googleâs Play Store does, which is a problem. There are also various third party websites like 148apps, Appshopper and Toucharcade that will allow you to search for applications. However, these sites are really geared towards discovering new and for-sale apps and not searching, and they also include news and reviews. If you are only interested in looking for apps, these sites are not the best options.
If you know the name of the app youâre looking for, one way to find its description page is to use the site operator with Google. So for example to find the application page Soundcloud, use the following command in Google search: soundcloud: apple.com. However, this can yield a lot of irrelevant and duplicate results, as app listings from various country-specific iTunes stores will likely also appear.
If you want a better App Store search without using iTunes, these two websites will serve your purpose:
Fnd.io
While the official website is for navigating through the App Store, if youâre trying to find something specific, then Fnd is a much better option. It has a much more robust search and also allows you to choose the country you want to get results from.
This is what you need to do:
- On the home page of Fnd.io, you can click the three horizontal lines in the upper right to explore the app store boxes. You can search for the best free apps or the best paid apps in the US App Store.In the upper left corner of the home page, click the country flag and select your country to search the App Store for your region.
- Open the Fnd website > enter your search query in the large search bar> press âSearch â.
- Now youâll see the first three search results in apps, music, movies, TV, books, Mac, and podcasts. To see more results in any of these categories, you can click on the category tab, which is above the search results, or on links such as âMore applicationsâthat appear after the three category results.
- Each search result has the name of the application in green and below that, you will see the section of the application, such as Social networks. Next to this section, you can see a small rectangle and / or a large rectangle. This is Fndâs way of showing if the app is available on iPhone, iPad, or both.
- Clicking on the app name in the Fnd search results, the App Store listing of the application and the YouTube videos related to the application are displayed. To the right of each search result and app listing is a box with a blue outline. This box mentions the price and has a small App Store icon. Click to navigate to the application page on the Apple website.
Vionza.com
If you are looking for a specific app or want to browse the Apple store, these two methods are good enough. If you want precise control over search results, you should use Vionza. For example, if you only want to see apps priced between ⏠0.99 and ⏠3.99, or apps rated more than 4 stars, then Vionza is the best option.
This is how it is used:
- The page you have to access to start looking for iOS apps is this: apps.vionza.com/about.php
- If you want to find applications for Mac, you can also do it from here: mac.vionza.com/about.php
- Type the name of the application in the search bar> press the key âEnter â or click âSearch â.
- Now you will get to the results page. On the left side, youâll see sliders to filter prices and ratings.
- Adjust the sliders to the price range and rating range you are looking for. For example, you can set it to search for only free apps, or only top-rated apps, or any combination in between.
- Above the sliders, you will see two headings: Sort apps by and Type of device. Here you can organize the results by relevance, name, price or rating. You can also filter the results by device type: iPhone only, iPad only, or universal apps.
- Vionza only allows you to search for App Store pages from five regions: Australia, Canada, Germany, US, and UK. Unfortunately, the India or Spain store is not supported so you will not be able to see the price in rupees or euros.
- Unlike Fnd and iTunes Preview, Vionza does not allow you to view the graphics of the app store.
So much Vionza as Fnd they work as advertised on mobile browsers too. If you want to search for iOS applications from an Android device or without opening the App Store application, either of these two services must do the job. We tried a few other services, but these were the best ways to search the App Store. If you have a better alternative, please leave them through comments.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments, we will answer you as soon as possible, and it will also be of great help to more members of the community. Thank you! đ
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