The App Store for iOS and Mac is a great place to find new applications for your Apple devices, but their search algorithms are not the best. iTunes does not have advanced search functions, and many people don't care about software at all. Fortunately, don't "fight" with iTunes to browse and search the App Store.
Not many people know this, but Apple's official website offers you a way to navigate the iOS and Mac app stores. You can check various subcategories, such as Books, Games and Productivity, to see the most popular applications in these categories, or go to the alphabetical list of applications in each category.
However, that can tire you out quickly, and the official site doesn't have a powerful enough app search feature like Google's Play Store does, which is a problem. There are also various third party websites like 148apps, Appshopper and Toucharcade that will allow you to search for applications. However, these sites are really geared toward discovering new and for sale apps and not search, and they also include news and reviews. If you are only interested in searching for apps, these sites are not the best options.
Steps to be able to search and navigate the Apple app store without having iTunes
If you know the name of the app you're looking for, one way to find its description page is to use the site operator with Google. So for example to find the app page SoundCloud, use the following command in the Google search engine: soundcloud: apple.com. However, this can yield many irrelevant and duplicate results as app listings from various country-specific iTunes stores are likely to appear as well.
If you want a better search in the App Store without using iTunes, these two websites will serve your purpose:
Fnd.io
While the official website is good for navigating through the App Store, if you're trying to find something specific, then Fnd is a much better option. It has a much stronger search and also allows you to choose the country you want to get results from.
This is what you need to do:
- On the home page of Fnd.io, you can click the three horizontal lines in the upper right to explore the boxes in the app stores. You can search for the best free applications or the best paid applications in the US App Store In the upper left corner of the home page, click on the country flag and select your country to search the App Store of your region.
- Open up the Fnd website > enter your search query in the large search bar> press «Search ».
- Now you'll see the first three search results in apps, music, movies, TV, books, Mac, and podcasts. To see more results in any of these categories, you can click on the category tab, which is above the search results, or on links such as «More apps»Appearing after the three category results.
- Each search result has the name of the application in green and below that, you will see the application section, such as Social networks. Next to this section, you can see a small rectangle and / or a large rectangle. This is how Fnd shows if the app is available on iPhone, iPad, or both.
- Clicking on app name in Fnd search results, the App Store listing of the application and YouTube videos related to the application are displayed. To the right of each search result and app listing is a box with a blue outline. This box mentions the price and has a small App Store icon. Click to navigate to the app page on the Apple website.
Vionza.com
If you are looking for a specific application or want to browse the Apple store, these two methods are good enough. If you want precise control over search results, you must use Vionza. For example, if you only want to see apps priced between € 0.99 and € 3.99, or rated apps with more than 4 stars, then Vionza is the best choice.
This is how it is used:
- The page you have to access to start looking for iOS apps is this: apps.vionza.com/about.php
- If you want to search for applications for Mac, you can also do it from here: mac.vionza.com/about.php
- Type the name of the application in the search bar> press the «keyEnter » or click on «Search ».
- Now you will get to the results page. On the left side, you'll see sliders to filter prices and ratings.
- Adjust the sliders to the price range and rating range you are looking for. For example, you can configure it to search for only free apps, or only top-rated apps, or any combination in between.
- Above the sliders, you'll see two headings: Sort apps by and Type of device. Here you can organize the results by relevance, name, price or rating. You can also filter the results by device type: iPhone only, iPad only, or universal apps.
- Vionza only allows you to search App Store pages for five regions: Australia, Canada, Germany, USA and UK. Unfortunately, the Indian or Spanish store is not compatible, so you will not be able to see the price in rupees or euros.
- Unlike Fnd and iTunes Preview, Vionza does not allow you to view graphics from the app store.
So much Vionza as Fnd They work as advertised in mobile browsers too. If you want to search for iOS apps from an Android device or without opening the App Store app, either of these two services must do the job. We tried some other services, but these were the best ways to search the App Store. If you have a better alternative, leave them through comments.