App marketing and promotion company Appsfire released a new version of their popular iPhone app, adding a “Breaking News” feature to the app, which will provide a newsfeed of updates to popular apps. The service, which monitors the quality of apps, as well as updates, has fire hose access to the Apple App Store, and often catches app updates before they’re even public.
First notification I get this morning: " @ylechelle starred #GoogleMaps on @appsfire" – immediately downloaded Google Maps. Thanks @appsfire
— liam (@LiamBoogar) December 13, 2012
As pointed out on The Next Web, while the company has previously used Twitter as a means of announcing the breaking news in the App Store, its iPhone users represent a much larger following than its Twitter users, and so users will now be able to follow App Store news directly from Appsfire.
While this doesn’t necessarily mark a business model shift for Appsfire, who has been surrounded with a lot of controversy in previous months (specifically with AppGratis, not Appsfire itself), it does raise the question of whether Appsfire sees this as an investment in user engagement, or whether it’s just another marketing channel to get users downloading more apps. I’d be curious to know how many of their 10 Million+ app downloads are users who download apps as soon as they’re available (I know I do, after reading the update description of course).