Finding new Play Store apps used to be frustrating, but this clever tool changes everything

It never fails to amaze me how bad Google is and continues to be at search. For a company that made its bones in this category, its apps lack the ability to adequately help me find what I’m looking for, and I can’t think of a worse example than the Google Play Store.

I’ve mentioned several of the Play Store’s flaws in a recent feature, but its search functionality — or lack thereof — is still one issue I can’t seem to shake. Thankfully, others have noticed this problem and developed their own pioneering solutions. Recently, I discovered an app that makes discovering Android apps so much easier; it’s called App Finder.

Beyond offering a smattering of “sponsored” apps at the top of the search results page and ads wherever there is room, the Play Store’s search results lack fine-tuning. You get what Google wants you to get. It’s not about searching for a specific app, but about prompting Google to suggest what it believes you want. One can understand how this can lead to plenty of annoyance.

App Finder takes a different approach by handing back control to the user. It’s a third-party search engine that reliably sniffs out Play Store apps based on user-defined criteria. It’s effectively the Advanced Search tool in Google Search for the Play Store, and pulls details from an app’s title, package name, summary, description, and even the changelog. This makes it farther-reaching than the solution baked into Google’s own app.

After installation, you’ll notice one glaring issue with App Finder; it’s by no means a Material 3 Expressive-adhering app. The best way to describe App Finder’s UI is to say it’s aesthetically humble. Its home screen heavily privileges function over form, but I soon realized this is a positive decision. After all, it’s a search tool not an app beauty pageant entrant. It’s user-customizable too, allowing me to select which search modifiers I want readily available.

Find apps easily using filters, modifiers, and scales

If I want to search for a specific app, I can type my query into the search bar — just like the Play Store. However, unlike Google’s surface-level solution, I don’t receive a screenful of ads masquerading as results. Despite this advantage, I don’t use App Finder this way, at least if I’m searching for a popular or major app. Instead, its real strength is in its search modifiers, filters, and sliding scales.

Let me provide an example. If I want to find all apps with the term “music” in their title, I type this into the search bar. Easy. Without any filters applied, App Finder highlights more than 55,600 results. (Hilariously, this is already more information than the Play Store provides.) However, if I move the Average user rating to at least 4.7, increase the Number of ratings slider to 100k, and toggle on the No ads selector, I can whittle that down to 30 results. This level of control over which apps appear in your search report is simply not achievable in the Play Store.

There are a ridiculously wide range of filters and sliders in App Finder. Users can control the total number of downloads and the in-app price range, or filter by release, updated dates, or genre, and even sort by current downloads/month. That latter detail is a far smarter metric for charting app popularity than the Play Store’s trending charts. You can also view this data by country or see aggregated worldwide data.

I also regularly use App Finder to seek out apps that are on sale — it’s a nifty cheat code for finding games. If you crank up the rating to the high 4s, you can generally find some pretty entertaining titles lurking within the Play Store. It’s similarly useful for finding new titles that just hit the Play Store’s gaming category.

Somehow, if you need even more control, you can take advantage of App Finder’s search operators. I can include a + to demand that results include a specific phrase in their title or summary, discarding other results. Then there’s the use of quotes, which allows me to search for exact, lengthier strings. OR allows me to search for results that may contain multiple words (for instance, video player OR media player). App Finder dedicates an entire in-app help page for these operators. I really appreciate this little detail, and I still visit this page now and then.

As much as I love App Finder, it does have areas in need of further polish. Yes, the UI is functional and intuitive, but it still feels decidedly dated. The results screen could do a better job of highlighting relevant info, and text spacing and weight does feel too compressed for my liking.

Then there are the development question marks. Although App Finder is still fully functional, it hasn’t seen an update since October 2024. More worrying, the developer has noted that it’s planning “AI-based natural language search,” which makes my skin crawl and would other anti-AI consumers, too. Does App Finder need such an addition? No, I don’t believe it does. Does anything with the word AI in it continue to sell? Publishers and developers sure seem to think so.

Finally, it’s worth noting that App Finder does have a paid component. Although the bulk of the app is available to consumers for free (at least at the time of this writing), you’ll need to upgrade to unlock more filters, enhanced scale ranges, and the ability to export data for further study. Given its functionality, App Finder is not all that expensive either. The Ultimate tier is around $10 for a lifetime unlock, and provided that Google doesn’t make any major changes to the Play Store that disrupt App Finder’s functionality, this doesn’t seem too steep.

With Google continually delivering a sub-par search experience on the Play Store, it’s becoming more necessary rather than convenient to use a third-party search app like App Finder to discover interesting sales, trending, and hidden apps. Yes, it sure has its quirks, but I cannot knock the incredible customizability, functionality, and information that App Finder provides.