StumbleUpon brings its discovery tools to Android apps

StumbleUpon, traditionally a tool for website discovery, is taking a crack at application discovery on the Android Marketplace with the launch of its App Discovery feature on its Android app today.

The mobile app, which already helps users discover new websites, will recommend Android applications based on what web sites the user says they’ve “liked” via StumbleUpon’s interface. The new app recommendations will be based on a user’s own app preferences, as well as his or her friends’ app usage. If  the user finds an app they like, they can click through to the Android Marketplace and download it.

Discovery is the biggest, and also one of the newest, challenges that startups face today. There are already more than 300,000 apps on the iPhone App Store, and more than 1,000 more are added to that store daily. There are also about 115,000 apps on the Android Marketplace, according to AndroLib.com. So there’s a lot of noise, and it can be discouraging for mobile app developers to launch an application only to make a few dollars in sales a month.

StumbleUpon isn’t the first new tool for application discovery on the Android Marketplace — or any marketplace for that matter. AppStoreHQ, which launched at DiscoveryBeat 2010 a few weeks ago, helps users discover new Android applications in a similar way: It looks at a user’s own installed applications and his or her friends’ installed applications.

StumbleUpon was launched out of Canada in 2002 and didn’t move to the San Francisco Bay Area until 2006. It was acquired by eBay a year later for $75 million. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company raised $1.5 million from Google’s founding investor, Ram Shriram, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Topic founder Ariel Poler, and angel investor Ron Conway. Android users can download the StumbleUpon application today.

[Photo: magerleagues]