Chomp May Have Just Solved The Nightmare That Is Android App Search
Regardless of what you think about the Android platform, there's no denying that the Market experience for finding apps is pretty poor. And that's putting it nicely. Google has evolved the experience over the years, and the web-based Market helps a lot.
Context & Ripple Effects
App discovery has been the acknowledged weak point of Android: finding apps inside the Market is, by TechCrunch's own framing and the confirmed record, 'pretty poor', even after Google iterated on the experience and shipped a web-based Market that helps. The gap was visible enough that Google's own Sergey Brin called in September 2010 for smartphone apps to become searchable, effectively conceding the problem from the top.
Chomp arrives with credentials: since its August 2010 push to be the 'Google of apps', it has been building app-specific search rather than storefront browsing. The claim here — that it may have solved Android app search — is explicitly framed as 'may have' in the reporting, so treat it as a strong candidate, not settled fact.
First-order effects
- Android users gain a working alternative to Market search today, which puts Google's own discovery experience under direct side-by-side comparison with a two-person startup's product.
- Chomp extends beyond its original ambition into a specific platform, turning app search into a service developers now have to consider optimizing for alongside the Market itself.
Second-order effects
- Google faces competitive pressure to fix Market search from within rather than cede discovery to a third party — the same problem Brin flagged publicly five months earlier now has someone else's solution attached to it.
- If Chomp's ranking becomes a meaningful traffic source for Android apps, developers split their distribution optimization between the store's algorithms and an independent indexer, echoing how web SEO grew up beside Google.
Third-order effects
- App discovery risks becoming a contestable layer between the operating system owner and the user: whoever builds the best index of what apps do — not who owns the store — captures the entry point, a structural repeat of how web search displaced directories.
- Platform owners' incentive to absorb or neutralize independent app-search players grows with each such product, setting up acquisition-or-supplant dynamics around the app-discovery stack.
The trend: Mobile is developing a dedicated app-search layer on top of app stores, with startups like Chomp probing whether discovery can stay independent of the platforms that host the apps.