Now Alfrada Can Search, Analyse and Recommend Mobile Apps

September 14, 2026

Two tools land together and cover the whole phone market. Apple App Store searches Apple's store for iPhone, iPad and Mac apps. Google Play Store searches Google's store for Android apps and games, reads its top charts, opens any listing in full and reads the user reviews. Both come back with the numbers that actually decide a recommendation — rating, how many people that rating rests on, what it costs in your own currency, and when it was last updated — and both default to your own storefront, because an app-store price is meaningless without knowing which country's store it came from. Ask about an app and you get the app. Ask which habit tracker to install and Alfrada OS checks both stores, compares them, and tells you.

What you can do

• Search either store by anything — an app name ("Instagram", "Spotify"), or a category phrase ("habit tracker", "budgeting app"). Apple returns up to 200 ranked results; Google Play returns its search page plus, on request, a top chart.
• Get the numbers that decide a recommendation. Apple: star rating and review count, price and currency, age rating, install size, minimum OS version, current version, latest release notes, first-release and last-updated dates. Google Play: star rating, download tier (5M+, 500K+), price and currency, content rating, in-app-purchase range, and whether it's free.
• Read the Play Store charts. top_free, top_paid or top_grossing — for the whole store, for games only, or inside one category ("top grossing puzzle games"). Up to 200 ranked entries, the top 30 in full detail. Apple's search doesn't expose charts.
• Open one Android listing in full. A package name or a play.google.com link returns the download tier (10M+), review count and star histogram, in-app-purchase range, ads, content rating, current version, last-update date and release notes, required Android version, permissions, data-safety declarations, similar apps and the five most relevant reviews.
• Read the reviews. Up to 50 Google Play reviews, newest first or best rated, filtered to one star rating (1 to read the complaints) or one device type, each tagged with the app version it was written against.
• Prices in the right currency, automatically. Both storefronts default to your detected country, so the same app quotes $5.99 from New York, 6,99 € from Berlin and ¥1,000 from Tokyo. Name another market — "in Japan", "the UK store" — and it switches.
• Search a developer's whole catalogue — set search_by_developer on either tool and pass the publisher's name to list everything they ship.
• Filter the way the stores do. Apple: device (mobile iPhone, tablet iPad, desktop Mac). Google Play: price (free / paid), device (phone, tablet, tv, chromebook, watch, car, windows), and a kids age band (under_5, 6-8, 9-12).
• Beyond apps — Google Play's store: "movies" and store: "books" search Play's film and book catalogues with the same call.
• See it, not just read it — every result carries the app icon and up to 4 screenshots, rendered inline in the result card.
• Paste a store link — an apps.apple.com, itunes.apple.com or play.google.com URL in your message reaches for the right tool on its own.

Where this shows up

• You're about to recommend an app and want to know it isn't abandoned. "What's the rating on HabitKit, and when was it last updated?" A 4.75 across 758 reviews updated last week is a different answer from the same rating updated in 2023.
• You're picking between five apps that all look the same in search. "Compare the top habit trackers on the App Store and Google Play — rating, how many reviews or downloads, and price." Review count is what separates a real 4.8 from a 4.8 across nine reviews; a download tier is what separates a real product from a demo.
• You ship on both platforms and want the same read twice. Ask for an app's rating on the App Store and on Google Play in one message; each tool answers for its own store, and the difference between them tells you something about the Android build.
• You want the market, not a search result. "What are the top 20 grossing games on Google Play right now?" That's a chart, not a search — and the tool knows the difference.
• You want to know what users actually complain about. "Read the latest one-star reviews of Daylio on Google Play and summarise the recurring problems." Reviews sorted newest-first, one rating only, with the app version each was written against.
• You're checking an app before installing it on a work phone. "What permissions does this app ask for, and what does its data-safety section say?" Both come with the full Play listing.
• You're pricing your own app and need the competitive set. "What do the top 20 budgeting apps charge in the UK store?" Real prices in real currency, not a US list converted in your head.
• You're checking whether something is even available in a market. "Is this app on the Japanese App Store, and what does it cost there?"
• You're picking something for a child. "Best free apps for a 6-year-old on Android." The age band is a real filter, not a keyword.
• A colleague sent a store link and you want the details without leaving the chat. Paste it and ask what it does.

Try it

• "Find the best-rated habit tracker apps on the App Store and on Google Play, and tell me which one to install."
• "What does Procreate Pocket cost in the German App Store?"
• "Compare the top 10 budgeting apps in the UK — price, rating and last update — on both stores."
• "What are the top 10 grossing games on the Play Store?"
• "Top free productivity apps on Android — rating, downloads and whether they have in-app purchases."
• "List every app published by Meta Platforms, Inc. on the App Store, and every app by SEGA on Google Play."
• "Open the full Google Play listing for net.daylio — downloads, rating breakdown, permissions and what changed in the last update."
• "Read the 30 newest one-star reviews of Loop Habit Tracker and tell me what people are complaining about."
• "Show me iPad drawing apps, sorted by what's most reviewed."
• "What's this? https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/habit-tracker-habitkit/id6443918070"
• "What's this? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.isoron.uhabits"

Heads up

• The two stores measure differently, and that's the point of having both. Apple gives a review count; Google Play gives a download tier (5,000,000 means "5M+" — a floor, not a count) and the top charts, which Apple's search doesn't expose. Read them side by side rather than summing them.
• Ratings are per-storefront. An app's rating in the UK store is not its global rating. When you compare apps, compare them in one market, on one store.
• Storefront, not translation. country picks which country's store is searched — it changes availability, price and currency. lang only changes the display language of the listing text.
• An exact app name on Google Play gets a summary card. Search "Daylio" and Play renders the top hit as a compact card with rating and review count but no download tier or price. The result says so and names the fix: open that app with action: "product", which always has the full numbers. Apple's search doesn't do this.
• Play charts ignore the query. Ask for top_grossing and you get the chart; a query on the same call is set aside and the result says so. Scope a chart with category, not with words.
• Games live in Play's apps catalogue. A keyword search or category browse for games runs through apps (that's where Google Play answers); store: "games" is for the games charts and front page.
• Reviews are Google Play only, and anonymous. Review text, rating, date, app version and helpful-votes come through; reviewer names and avatars do not. Apple's tool returns each app's rating, review count and latest release notes — not the review text itself.
• Arabic and Hebrew have no App Store locale. Apple doesn't publish one, so a search asking for either is run in the default language and the result says so rather than failing.
• Movies and books listings on Play can be flaky. Search covers all four catalogues, but the full-listing action is built for apps; Play's movie pages sometimes fail upstream, and the tool says so rather than guessing.
• "No results" is an answer, not an error. On either store, a search that matches nothing comes back empty with an explanation, so a genuinely obscure query doesn't read as a broken tool.