Developer updates
I Went Looking for the Apps Nobody Sees
The App Store is enormous.
Millions of apps exist in it, but if you open the App Store and start browsing, you don't really see the App Store. You see the part Apple has chosen to put in front of you: featured apps, charts, collections, recommendations, and apps that are already getting attention.
I started wondering about everything underneath that.
What if I just wanted to see the apps that were released today?
Not the best apps released this week. Not "New and Noteworthy." Not the apps that already have thousands of downloads.
I wanted to see the apps nobody is looking at yet.
The brand-new weather app made by one person.
The oddly specific utility somebody built because they needed it themselves.
The first game from a developer nobody has heard of.
The app with zero ratings, zero reviews, and perhaps only a handful of people on Earth who even know it exists.
Basically, I wanted the raw feed.
Turns out, you can actually do this
I found a site called AppAgg, short for Application Aggregator.
They maintain a chronological list of recently released iOS apps, including apps that would probably never appear anywhere prominent inside Apple's own App Store.
You can browse the newest iOS apps here:
Browse newly released iOS apps on AppAgg
And this is where it gets funny.
While browsing around, I searched for GeoJSONic.
There it was.
My app was sitting in exactly the obscure corner of the App Store I had gone looking for.
And I kind of loved that.
The App Store has an invisible layer
When you build an app, you spend months — sometimes years — thinking about it.
You design it. You rewrite things. You test it. You obsess over tiny details nobody else will ever notice.
Then eventually you press the button and release it into a store containing millions of other apps.
And unless Apple features you, you already have an audience, or your launch happens to catch on, your app simply becomes one more tiny object floating around in that enormous database.
That's true for GeoJSONic, too.
GeoJSONic is an offline location journal built around open GeoJSON. You can save places, record routes, map areas, attach photos, voice recordings and notes, and keep the resulting geographic data on your own device instead of having to create an account and store everything on somebody else's server.
I've spent an absurd amount of time building it.
But from the perspective of the App Store, it started exactly where nearly every independent app starts: at zero. Zero downloads. Zero ratings. Zero people searching for its name.
And somewhere every day there are developers pressing that same Release button for the first time.
That's the part of the App Store I find fascinating.
These are somebody's projects
Scroll through the new-app feed long enough and you'll find plenty of things that look strange, unfinished, extremely niche, or just completely unlike anything a large company would ever build.
That's what makes it interesting.
Behind many of those listings is probably one developer who spent six months working after their day job.
Or somebody learning Swift who finally shipped their first app.
Or a person who needed a tool for an incredibly specific problem and decided other people might need it too.
Some of those apps will disappear. Some will probably never get more than a few downloads. Some may quietly develop a small group of users who absolutely love them. And one of them might eventually become an app everybody knows.
You can't tell yet. You're seeing them at the beginning.
It's almost like wandering through a flea market for software
The modern internet increasingly funnels us toward things that have already won.
Popular videos get recommended because they're popular. Popular posts get shown because people are engaging with them. Popular apps rank because people are already downloading them.
That system is useful, but it means discovery becomes circular. We mostly see what everybody else is already seeing.
Browsing apps chronologically breaks that loop. There's no popularity filter. No requirement that anybody else thinks something is interesting first.
It's just: here's what somebody released.
And I find that strangely refreshing.
Go look at the weird stuff
If you're an iPhone user, an app developer, or just somebody who enjoys discovering obscure software, spend a few minutes looking through the newest releases sometime.
Ignore the rankings. Click something because the icon looks strange. Try an app with no reviews. Look at what independent developers are experimenting with.
You might find something great. You might find something terrible. You might find something that makes you wonder how it possibly got approved.
But you'll be seeing a side of the App Store that most people never see. And somewhere in there, you'll find GeoJSONic too.
That feels like exactly where an indie app should start.
Download GeoJSONic on the App Store →
— Jason Dittmer Creator of GeoJSONic