Mobile Discovery App Trover Gets Lists And Smarter Search, Engagement Up 300% Since Last Year

Mobile discovery app Trover has always been a bit under the radar, despite having a very compelling product and high-profile investors like General Catalyst Partners, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital. The service, which is available for iOS and Android, just completed its latest round of feature updates that brought lists, full-screen browsing and better search to the app, moving it more toward being an entertainment app and not just a visual directory service. In addition, Trover today announced that, after it started to add some of these new features over the last few weeks, its visitors now average 27 page views per session. That’s a 35% increase over last month and a 300% increase compared to a year ago. On average, its users now open the app 2-3 times per week.

Since launching the lists feature a few weeks ago, the number of new lists created each day has now doubled, says the company. At the same time, the number of photos added to these lists by the service’s users has tripled.

When it launched, our own Leena Rao described Trover as “Yelp meets Instagram meets Foursquare because the combination of observation, location, as well as high-quality photo content.” For the most part, that’s still true today and if anything, the new full-screen browsing mode now does an even better job at highlighting images from Trover’s users.

In many ways, Trover’s experience seems to be similar to that of other travel/discovery related services like, for example, Gogobot. Its users aren’t just browsing the site when they are in a location and looking for something interesting to do. Instead, a lot of the engagement on these services is driven by users who are simply curious about a place they may one day visit.

“The Trover addiction doesn’t begin with a restaurant question or travel plan, it’s based on the daily joy of browsing places and discoveries others have found,” said Jason Karas, CEO of Trover in a canned statement. “But the things people find and remember on Trover increasingly serve as a personal guide when they’re looking for something new to see, do or eat. Trover is more interesting and social than apps dedicated to dining or travel planning, and that keeps people coming back in between outings.”