Appiast

Bookitics didn’t go unnoticed but there wasn’t much enthusiasm for it among the app.net crowd. One day someone told me “You know, this looks nice, but I’d like something like that for apps”. I thought about this some time and got the idea that I could transform Bookitics into an app rating app. It shouldn’t take me as long as creating Bookitics because I could reuse most of the code. The only really new part was the connection to the app store.

So I did what entrepreneurs sometimes do, pivoted and two months later released “Appiast”. The name is derived from “app enthusiast”. This app also was free but had a better chance at monetization. When you tapped on an app in appiast or on an app link from an appiast review in any app.net client, the app store app opened and since the link was an affiliation link I would get some small amount of money if the user bought the app. Even better: When a user clicks an affiliation link to Apple’s app store, the affiliate gets some small amount of money for every purchase the user makes in the app store during the next 24 hours as long as they don’t click on another affiliation link.

Appiast got much more recoginition than Bookitics. Many people lamented the lack of findability in the app store at that time. Appiast apparently struck a chord. People talked about it on app.net, installed it and rated their favorite apps. And they also clicked and tapped those affiliation links.

Unfortunately the app.net community was small and had already reached it’s peek growth. People started leaving it again. App.net accounts were paid accounts and if you cannot get your friends to join a social network, you leave it and go somewhere you can talk with them. The company running app.net came up with several ideas to make app.net more attractive to other people, but it really didn’t work out. They stopped working on it and finally closed it. The domain now belongs to some other company.

I actually left app.net before it really closed. As a developer you were required to pay $100 per year to enable access for your apps to the network. The affiliation links didn’t even pay for that.