With more than 1.4 million available apps in Apple’s iOS App Store, it can be difficult to find the best of the bunch. Things are even more difficult in the Google Play store for Android, because Google doesn’t have the same standards or approval processes that help Apple weed out a fair amount of the junk that would otherwise overrun its App Store.
Thanks to a few tricks recently uncovered by a blogger at the XDA Developers forum, finding the cream of the Android crop just got much easier.
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Every Android user out there will recall the groups of recommended apps on display at any given time in the Play store. Beyond the standard section in the store, these collections offer users access to curated groups of apps recommended by Google, suggesting that they offer a quality experience that is up to Google’s standards.
But the collections on display at any given time represent just a small sampling of all the apps Google has recommended.
Using some crafty Google searching and a little bit of guesswork, XDA will teach you how to create custom Google searches that will return lists of recommended Android apps. Believe it or not, there are actually more than 25,000 different apps that Google has recommended on a wide range of lists, so the possibilities are effectively endless considering all the different search parameters you can tweak.
In a nutshell, the trick allows you to modify two different searches — site:http://play.google.com/store/apps/collection and site:http://play.google.com/store/recommended inurl:apps — to return Google’s lists of apps. There are tons of different ways to tweak the URLs, and you’ll find all the details by following the link below in the source section.
