ZoomAppy: Your App Search Ally! All Star Edition

The estimated reading time for this post is 5 minutes

Unfortunately, ZoomAppy is no longer a functioning website.

ZoomAppy is a website I am incredibly excited to share with you. I’m always excited to share tech with you, but this website is especially exciting. Why? Because there is a strong need for better search functions for apps and ZoomAppy fills that need. ZoomAppy is a quick, easy and efficient search engine for apps that is far superior to the search  function on iTunes.

The question I get the most frequently from Wonder of Tech readers is: “Do you know of a good app for …?” Finding the best answers to these questions can be challenging because of how iTunes is organized. ZoomAppy is an app search website that makes finding the best apps a breeze.

You can sort your search results in twelve different ways, such as price, release date, user ratings, etc. I like sorting by user ratings as that’s usually the quickest way to find the best app in your search results.

When you find an app you like, click on the icon to go to the listing in the iTunes App Store to read the reviews and decide whether to buy the app. If you don’t like the app, hit the back button on your browser to return to ZoomAppy and explore other apps.

You can search for apps by going to zoomappy.com, clicking on the App Discovery page and choosing iOS or Mac apps (Android is coming soon). You can craft your search by using some or all of these search fields:

• Categories (Educational, Utilities, Kids Games, etc.)
• Popularity
• Country
• User Ratings (number of ratings and number of stars)
• Keywords
• Developer
• App Name
• On Sale
• Price
• Release dates
• Recently updated
• Hardware (iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch)

ZoomAppy has 42 Categories for searching apps, as opposed to 20 Categories in iTunes. ZoomAppy has 19 different categories of games, such as board, action, role playing, educational and kids. Not sure which categories you want to search? ZoomAppy lets you search multiple categories at once.

Choose your search fields and then hit Enter or the blue arrow in a circle at the top of the search column:

When you get your search results, you have a choice of viewing the results in a grid of icons:

or a list with lots of information about the apps:

You can sort your search results in twelve different ways, such as price, release date, user ratings, etc. I like sorting by user ratings as that’s usually the quickest way to find the best app in your search results.

When you find an app you like, click on the icon to go to the listing in the iTunes App Store to read the reviews and decide whether to buy the app. If you don’t like the app, hit the back button on your browser to return to ZoomAppy and explore other apps.

An Example of a ZoomAppy App Search

One of my favorite ways to use ZoomAppy is searching for apps that a certain developer has on sale. Take a developer like Electronic Arts that has high quality apps such as Scrabble, Madden Football, Monopoly,and Risk that can be quite expensive. Occasionally, Electronic Arts has a 90% off sale on some of these apps, often from $10 down to $1. When this happens, you should grab them.

ZoomAppy makes it easy to search for these sales. Just search “Developer: Electronic Arts” under Keyword Search and click on the box that says “Show Apps on Sale” under Price. Go down to Hardware and choose your device. Hit Enter or the blue arrow and you will be taken to all of the Electronic Arts apps on sale (you should actually do this search on ZoomAppy because Electronic Arts has some great iPhone/iPod Touch apps on sale right now).

Let’s say you want to search for an app in the iTunes App Store. If you happen to search for the correct keyword, you will see a page with Songs, Albums, Podcasts, Tv Shows, etc. You select Apps and then see two sections, iPhone and iPad apps. You click on iPhone and then get a page of app icons in no particular order. You can’t rank them by best selling, highest ratings, most recent, price, etc. so you have to sift through your results one by one to see what their ratings are, when they were released, etc. If your search reveals hundreds of apps, you could waste a lot of time sifting through your results and never find the best app.

In iTunes you can search by Category by clicking on Power Search, but the categories are so broad, Power Search isn’t much of a help. iTunes only has 19 categories, ZoomAppy has 42. In iTunes you can only search one category at a time, with ZoomAppy you can search multiple categories at once.

In short, searching for apps in iTunes is complicated, time consuming and inefficient. It’s easy why to see why so many Wonder of Tech readers ask for help with their app searches.

Bottom Line

If you own an iOS device (iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch) or a Mac computer, you should bookmark ZoomAppy and make sure to use it the next time you search for an app. You will save yourself loads of time and end up with much better search results. The more apps that are added to the App Store, the more valuable ZoomAppy becomes!

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Have you tried ZoomAppy? Have you discovered any great apps? Awesome sales? If you try ZoomAppy, let us know your results in the Comments section below, especially if you discover any great new apps!

This article is part of The Wonder of Tech All Star series to satisfy your tech cravings while Carolyn is on vacation. This article is an update of an article that was originally published on The Wonder of Tech on May 4, 2011. You can access the article here if you would like to read the comments on the original version. You can leave comments below and Carolyn will respond after she returns from her vacation on August 20.