Outside of the rather good iPhone App store, the problem with mobile applications is finding the bastards. Back in the day it used to be easy – there were hardly any. If you wanted a new app for your Palm Pilot you just went to PalmGear, or similar. Now there are thousands, probably millions, stretched across multiple platforms and handsets. Plus the reviews and ratings are getting locked in. The iPhone’s App Store is great, but all those reviews and ratings are inside that store. The same goes for GetJar. What we need is an aggregator / search engine which has Digg functionality so we can rate apps up and down and it’s independent of all the platforms and handsets.
Uk startup MJelly has realised this and launched a search and discovery service for mobile 2.0 sites, software and applications at www.mjelly.com on the PC and, cleveryl, m.mjelly.com on your mobile.
Founder James Coops knows his mobile stuff so this should be a good resource. In addition to listings of mobile web sites mjelly provides a free applications download service for mobile software, similar to the iphone app store, but available for a wider range of phones such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola.
Slight problem though – until you guys all go visit and start rating the many listed apps there’s not a lot of data to go on. I also wanted more simple, straight pointers to “iPhone apps”, say. The interface could probably also do with a nicer sheen, but as this is a boostrap startup we’ll let them off for now.