If you’ve searched the iTunes App Store, you know that it’s less than user friendly most of the time. Search filters for price, category, etc. are just not possible and if you’re just looking for a specific app, forget it. Since even with their latest release, Apple hasn’t addressed this issue, it was only a matter of time before someone else stepped in and did it for them.
That someone looks like uQuery.com. The front end of this is a search engine. It searches the app store much more quickly than iTunes’ own search feature and it has a lot of filtering options including price, release date, and app category. A truly fast and useful search.
The back-end is a complete index of the App Store that’s updated continually. This index’s data is pulled from the App Store (including product photos/screenshots and the like) and it’s then compiled for faster searching. The only thing it doesn’t pull is customer reviews, which would be nice, but you can read those when you link from a found app to the store.
Currently, uQuery only works for the U.S. iTunes App Store, but other countries are coming soon, they’ve promised.
The site is well-built and runs quickly. Filtering is great since it allows you to find new games, filtered by category (genre) and price. So searching for, say, board games that are $0.99 or less is easy and brings up a list very quickly.
uQuery is free to use and definitely worth checking out of you’re a regular at the iTunes App Store.
