Here on our blog, we haven’t given curated app stores the love they deserve. Short of a few brief mentions in other posts about App47’s features, we haven’t mentioned them much, and we think it’s about time we changed that.
What’s a curated app store? Put simply, it’s a set of publicly available apps in an enterprise app store. At App47, our customers set up a curated app store by pulling the public app information from a public app store (like iTunes), presenting a curated subset of apps to a user, and running the install from the public app store.
We act as a third party between the public app store and the user, achieving two main goals for our customers: easy app discovery for their users, and an additional branding opportunity for our customers to their users through App47’s branding features.
If you’re having a hard time conceptualizing what that may look like in use, fear not: we have examples. Here are a few ways our clients are using curated app stores:
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- Providing information and services as part of their yearly fee. We work with a large food manufacturer that has relationships with producers all over the country. Part of their yearly fee includes providing those producers with the best information and services around.Based on the users and their roles within our system, we’re able to pair individual users with the best apps they need (e.g. the best wheat farming apps for wheat farmers, and the best ranching-related apps for ranchers in the Midwest). This saves producers the trouble of surfing through hundreds of thousands of apps, all while giving them great, trusted information from the food manufacturer we’re working with.
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- Empowering the customer. Another company we work with builds products for public libraries to manage their books. In addition to helping this company with their internally-distributed app that helps folks run their libraries, we also helped this company set up a (fully branded) curated app store to empower their customers.With this curated app store, not only do their customers have access to all of their own unique solutions, they also have access to other apps that our client believes are productive and interesting. No one outside of the organization has any idea that they’re dealing with a third-party solution, and everyone gets access to apps that can help them use the library system more efficiently.
- Onboarding and managing who sees and gets which apps. Finally, a global distributor we’re working with has a set of apps in the public app store that they want their business partners to use. Some are publicly available, some are B2B, and different partners need access to certain apps, while being restricted from access to others. They were looking for a way to onboard those partners and easily manage who sees and gets which apps, and all of that is easily managed within the App47 system.
We’ve been talking about enterprise app stores for the last three years, and that market continues to grow and be very exciting. This notion of the curated app store is picking up a lot of steam—and for good reason.
Public app stores are great for distribution, but discovery still remains hard when you’re trying to present a unified message from your store. And while a lot of companies have provided solutions that do this for the consumer, not many have done the same thing for businesses. All-in-all, the curated app store is a new opportunity in the world of MAM that’s taking hold and becoming more prevalent throughout our current customers.
Want to learn more about what a curated app store can do for you? Get in touch and let us know!
