The team behind the app announced the news in a blog post on Sunday.

AppShopper Social has a very familiar look and feel to it when compared to the original app. The app name has changed, which means I can continue to use the new app and the older version of App Shopper to find new apps to download. But the big difference in this version is that is no longer lists every app in the App Store in ranked order, which was too similar  to what Apple does with its own App Store lists.

If you’re familiar with the old version of the app, what you’ll find missing from AppShopper Social are the What’s New and Top 200 lists. Thankfully the Wish List and My Apps lists are still present and are linked to my AppShopper.com account data. While I may not be able to use the new app to shop for apps that are trending toward the tops of the lists, I will at least be able to track all of the apps on my Wish List again.

Another notable difference from the old app is a switch from a Popular list of apps to a new Stream list. The Stream, as AppShopper calls it, is a continuous list of app recommendations that have been made by the friends you have added to your friends list. Your friends list can be compiled by manually adding other users within the app. You can also enter your Twitter account credentials, which will let you add all of those you follow in Twitter that also have AppShopper accounts as friends. Attaching AppShopper to your Twitter account is currently not required, as I was able to add quite a few AppShopper friends to my list without linking my Twitter account directly.

The current version will not allow you to drill down into your friends list of apps or wish lists directly.  It would be nice to see the apps my friends also want to buy, and that is a feature that AppShopper claims to be working on for a future release. Also on AppShopper’s to-do list is a way to make friend discovery an easier task. I can definitely see where I may want to follow one group of friends because they have interesting things to say, and another group of friends because they have interesting taste in apps. AppShopper will also be looking to update the iPad version of the app as this initial release is only for the iPhone, the developers said in their blog post.

The team behind AppShopper is still treading on thin ice with Apple’s App Store rules, apparently: its recent blog post states that “a few features didn’t make the first cut,” referring to the What’s New and Top 200 features. But the developer promises it “will see about returning those features in a future version.”

I am just happy to see the app return as it has been an integral part of my app shopping experience for quite a while now.

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With over 800,000 apps in the iOS App Store to sift through, Apple isn’t helping by cracking down on some of the better apps for discovering apps you might like. Finding what you are looking for remains a challenge.  While there is no one way to tell if an app will meet your needs or not before buying or downloading, the following will shed some light on the challenges in identifying apps you might like, and offer some advice on how to find them.

The App Store’s search problem

Searching for Apps

iOS apps are searchable by app name, company name, and keywords only in the App Store. Since most apps try to limit their names to what is viewable on the home screen (about 12 characters depending on what letters are used), company names do not necessarily represent the functionality of the app. Developers are also limited to a total of 100 characters in listing the app’s keywords; which can present a challenge for developers getting their apps discovered by customers. While the 4,000 character description may be enough to explain the functionality of the app, that description is not used in the search.

What does not help matters much is that there are three different search interfaces. When you search for apps on your iPhone, you will not see any results for apps that only install on the iPad. This can be frustrating if you are looking for an app that works well on both the iPhone and iPad, and the developer has elected to create an app for each device, rather than a universal app for both.  The iTunes search on a Mac will initially show you results for all content matching your keywords, including songs, movies, books and podcasts.  You can filter the results to show only iPhone or iPad apps, but this gets frustrating each time you refine your search.  The iPad has the best search experience of the three as you see only apps in the search result, and you can search for both iPhone and iPad apps.

The problem with all three is that the search results are presented in a fashion that you can only see a handful of the search results initially.  You must click, swipe, tap or scroll to see more than a few results.

Fortunately Apple is not the only place that you can search for apps available in the App Store.  Apple has made what is called the Enterprise Partner Feed available to third parties.  It is a data feed of every piece of metadata in the iTunes Store and App Store. This enables third parties like AppShopper.com, AppAdvice.com and 148apps.com to organize, display, and query all of the metadata information in the App Store.  If you have become as frustrated as I have with Apples search, try one of these instead.  Note though, you will find the search results different with each service.

Wish lists and app lists

Wish Lists and App Lists

A great resource for me has always been AppShopper’s Wish Lists. Once you open a free account with AppShopper, you have the ability to create and manage a wish list of apps that you are interested in. With this list, you can monitor apps that interest you and set up an email alert whenever the app is updated or the price drops. This is a great way to keep up to date with apps that caught your eye but you weren’t quite ready to buy because it was missing a key feature or was priced a little too high.

AppAdvice on the other hand has a different twist to lists: rather than you coming up with a list of apps that interest you, they have created topic-based lists called AppLists.  Examples include Apps for Volunteering, a collection of apps that was put together for individuals that are interested in volunteering their time and resources in their communities.  There are also lists for Foodies, Comic Geeks, Poets and Coffee Lovers.  These AppLists are a great way of discovering apps that are more narrowly focused than Apple’s broader categories.

From time to time, Apple will come out with a good topic list of the top apps that is very similar to AppAdvice’s AppLists. Two of my current favorites are titled Entertain your Kidsand Apps for Parents.  While topical categories from Apple are great ways to discover new apps that are closely related to one another, there is no one place to go to see all of the topic based lists of apps that Apple has put together. You will see a select and frequenlty updated number of these lists on the iTunes home page or on the features page in the App Store, but not all of them. The best way to gain access to these lists is to subscribe to Apple’s iTunes newsletter when managing your Apple ID.  Under language and contact preferences you will see a checkbox for iTunes newsletters. This is where Apple tends to announce the new lists they have pulled together.

Do your homework

Reviews, Rankings and Releases

Reviews, releases and rankings are the three Rs of app shopping.  One of the first things you should look at is the original release date of the app and how often it has been updated. With services like AppShopper.com, you can also see how often the developer has decided to change the price of the app as well.  Apps that are frequently updated likely point an attentive development team and can lead to a better experience overall.

Reviews posted to the App Store can go either way.  Give less attention to reviews that complain only about the price rather than features or quality.  Just because an app costs more does not make it bad.  You may find value in an app that others may not.  If, on the other hand, you see lots of reviews claiming that the app crashes or is buggy, then you need to look back at the version history to see if the developer is paying attention and trying to resolve the issue.

You also need to consider the total cost of ownership when buying an app, which includes in-app purchases. This is not hard to figure out as each app in the App Store will list its available in-app purchases.  Something to look for is how the in-app purchases are ranked since they are sorted by popularity: if you see high-priced items listed before lower-priced items, then you know that users of the app have found it necessary to buy those in order to use the app.

Use Genius to replace outdated apps

Use Genius to Replace Apps

Genius is a great tool for finding new games that are similar to the games you have already purchased. But it is not a great resource for finding new apps that are completely different from the ones you already own. A good use of Genius is to locate a replacement for an app that you used to love, but has not been updated in a while or has just stopped working all together. A great example of this is when Google announced that it would be shutting down its Reader service. You can use Genius to look for alternative news apps that are not dependent on this service.

For now, there is nothing out there better than word of mouth that can assist you in finding great apps that will enlighten your life or make you more productive.  And with Apple pulling apps from the App Store that can help make this task easier, one begins to wonder if the situation will ever improve.

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Twitter announced updates to its Twitter Cards at a developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and the most interesting news is that tweets will now allow for third-party developers to include download links within those tweets, turning Twitter into more of an app discovery platform and showing users where content is coming from.

So for instance, if your friend posts a photo to the social network Path and cross-posts that photo to Twitter, and if you don’t already have Path installed, you’ll see a link where you can go download Path. And if you do have Path installed, the link can serve as a deep link that will allow you to head directly to the content in that app.

It might seem slightly counterintuitive for Twitter — why would the company want to send you elsewhere? But clearly Twitter has realized that people respond positively to visual, richer content within tweets, like the short basketball clips embedded in March Madness tweets. So if Twitter becomes a more interesting place, that’s obviously a win for the company.

Mike Isaac wrote for AllThingsD last week that the developer event would revolve around cards, and explained why the cards matter so much for the future of Twitter’s business. Facebook has built up its third-party developer community in recent years, and while Twitter struggled to work with developers last summer over API guidelines, this could be a new way for the company to build a more positive ecosystem around its product.

The updates to Cards also come with some changes to the types of content that can be tweeted out, including app descriptions, product details, and galleries, to show that more than one photo is being shared. The blog post from Twitter explained:

“We first introduced expanded Tweets with three card types: summary, photo and player/video. Since then, we’ve heard that publishers want to be able to share different types of content. With these new card types, more publishers can show more types of content on Twitter.

Finally, with this update to Cards, we’ve fundamentally re-architected the way Cards are created and delivered. The new Cards system lays a foundation that will make it easier for us to develop more types of Cards in the future and allow for greater customization by publishers and developers. Additionally, this new system is backward compatible; if you’ve already implemented Cards, your integrations will continue to work seamlessly.”

Twitter announced that its first partners for this roll-out include Delectable, Etsy, Flickr, Foursquare, Gumroad, Jawbone, Path, Rovio’s Angry Birds, SoundCloud, Storenvy, Wine Library and Vine.

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Appsfire 4.0, which is debuting Monday on iOS, has been rebuilt to speed up the app finding experience and make its recommendations more relevant. It should give iOS users a solid alternative to the newly upgraded Apple App Store. As my colleague Erica Ogg pointed out, the App Store, remodeled after Apple’s acquisition of app search tool Chomp, still needs improvements in several areas including search relevancy.

Appsfire 4.0 allows people to get fast search results for an app name, developer, category or a need. I tried it out and found it seems a step smarter than the App Store in figuring out what I’m actually looking for. The App Store has gotten better at what a user is trying to search for but still looks more at downloads so it can struggle with all the different kinds of searches that people undertake.

The Appsfire recommendation engine is also more attuned to an individual user thanks to updated preference settings. Now, users can set their price sensitivity, their interest in games, and how much deals matter to them. That’s in addition to more general profiles like geek, parent, gamer or traveler that they can set for themselves.

Appsfire’s recommendations work with Appsfire’s App Scores, which it developed as an alternative to Apple’s App Store rankings. Unlike the App Store rankings, which are largely tied to downloads, Appsfire uses app ratings, developer reputation, and web mentions and reviews to come up with its own score. Now, Appsfire bases its recommendation on what it thinks is best for a user, not just which apps are on sale, which is what it did in the Appsfire Deals app.

The Appsfire experience is more social as well. Inside the app pages, Appsfire pulls in prominent Twitter and Facebook comments in a feature called Chatter. Users can create their own curated lists of apps, which can be shared and will eventually feed back into the recommendation engine. Appsfire users can also connect via Facebook to see what their friends have saved and downloaded.

Ouriel Ohayon, founder of Appsfire, told me the decision to collapse Appsfire’s two apps into one was largely practical because it’s hard to manage and market two apps. But it also means that users can get everything they need from one app, which can now address not just sales shoppers but users just looking for the best app for them.

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The new language in the App Store rules states: “Apps that display apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” Techcrunch noted the concerns of developers on Monday.

Because the App Store has for so long promoted the most popular apps rather than the best apps, a cottage industry has emerged that attempts to solve this problem (subscription required). On its face, “apps that display apps other than your own for purchase or promotion” would disqualify popular iOS recommendation apps like Appoday, Appsfire and others that recommend quality apps to iOS users through editorial or social criteria. It’s just another way to get promoted or find an audience on the App Store, which is now 700,000 apps strong.

I talked to Appsfire’s co-founder, Ouriel Ohayon, who says that his app, which offers social recommendations for iOS apps, has not been affected by the rule changes. That’s because his app has seen two different updates submitted and approved by Apple since the changes were implemented. That’s a good indication he’s in the clear — at least for now.

If the rules were intended to include Appsfire and its ilk, what would that mean for Facebook? Apple and Facebook only recently have gotten back on good terms after their falling out in the run-up to the launch of Apple’s Ping social music network (that has since been shut down). Is Apple about to excise one of the most popular apps of all time from the App Store because of Facebook’s new app promotion service? “I have a hard time thinking Apple would reject Facebook now that they sport the App Center,” Ohayon told me.

I do too.

He thinks what’s more likely is that Apple is trying to weed out app recommendation “clones” that look too much like the App Store. That’s the “promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store” part of the new rule’s language. AppGratis’ CEO Simon Dawlat told PocketGamer.biz essentially the same thing.

Cloned apps that are ripoffs of other successful apps or apps that exist simply to promote others are not a new problem on the App Store. Apple has taken steps in the past to root these out, sometimes removing apps at another developer’s request. A month ago, Apple went even further and introduced a tool that allowed any developer to easily report cloned or copyright-infringing apps.

Apple began cracking down a year ago on apps participating in incentivized pay-per-install programs — app makers could pay other apps to promote its apps as a marketing tactic. Those kinds of apps are now rejected from the App Store. The rule change appears to be an extension of that same effort.

Apple did not comment on the change. But it sounds like if your app-recommending app doesn’t go too far in imitating Apple’s own iOS App Store, you’re probably safe.

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So you wait a week, two weeks … No gold rush for you. You’re app is not taking off. Why can’t all developers find their way and be successful? Why is success limited only limited to a few? You want to blame the Apple’s App Store for not having the right discovery mechanisms built for your app. But the reality is, this is not just Apple’s fault.

Most developers underestimate how hard it is to be successful in Apple’s App Store. And even if Apple is improving things, it’s not going to be enough. Ever since the App Store launched, I’ve been frustrated with app discovery. We all have our obsessions. I’m obsessed with finding great apps, which is why I cofounded Appsfire, a company focused on finding a solution.

But why is this problem so hard to solve? The answer is not straightforward. Let’s look at the various angles.

The developer side

It’s not enough to build a great app with a nice design and a nice user experience. A mobile app is a business, and it has to be managed like one.

If an app doesn’t solve a critical need in a beautiful way, it has little chance of survival in the long run.

The marketing plan, including knowing your own competition, has to be built and implemented before you even launch an app. Remember, apps are displayed in iTunes, which is a content store.

Apps need to be analyzed and optimized based on usage data and lifetime value. Many developers are still obsessed with low CPIs (cost per install) rather than trying to get the best users and keeping them engaged.

Launching an app is not just a design exercise backed with solid code. It’s a real business. Some of app studios have become so big (e.g. Zynga and Outfit7) that they don’t even need any sort of favor from Apple or Google to get massive visibility. They just self-promote their app.

The Apple App Store side

Apple announced 700,000 live iOS apps (close to one million have been created so far) and a newer app store. They also announced that 90% of all apps were downloaded every month. But everyone knows that only those apps in the top ranks or highlighted by Apple get any real traction.

So, is Apple doing enough for your new app?

Well, many developers forget that it is only a store. It’s not a marketing or advertising company.

Yes, Apple released a new version of its App Store. And just like any other online retailer, Apple does not let developers control the majority of the discovery process (even when they feature you).

What can Apple do to make life easier for developers?

A speedier review process would help developers iterate faster. A better interface for app management/analytics would be useful. Separate apps in the games category from non-games to give the other 20-plus categories a better chance. Those would all be nice upgrades but not dramatic changes.

What would be a dramatic change? Killing the top charts.

Rankings are the primary way consumers discover new apps. This is why so many app developers are trying different marketing techniques and bots (before bots were blacklisted by Apple) to get into the top ranks.

Killing the ranking system would force users to be more active in finding apps. And it would give more chances to more developers.

But it’s unlikely to happen.

The consumer side

Most smartphone users have more than 75 apps on their device. Only a few are regularly used. Most are forgotten and sometimes uninstalled. That’s the tough reality.

Consumers have a hard time finding good apps. But, paradoxically, they don’t care enough to read reviews, compare apps or even search for apps. On mobile people are lazy.

People need trusted sources to make quick decisions. This explains the growing popularity of third-party discovery solutions. They provide a good shortcut to decisions, just as shopping engines have done for e-commerce sites.

And trust in app discovery is probably the most important missing brick today. It is hard to build, communicate and maintain, because it requires a consistent effort of transparency, engineering, expertise, relevancy and independence

The App Store is not enough. It is built the same for everyone.

This explains why Facebook has developed the App Center. But that’s far from enough. You can’t trust your friends with every single decision they make. The solution is more about a specific taste graph for apps. And Facebook is not there.

The ad networks’ side

Millions of users find out about apps though advertising or paid discovery. (Something Apple does not include in its $5 billion paid to developers).

But the mobile ad industry is still young, and mobile advertising is not yet very consumer friendly or advertiser friendly. Banners are annoying, intrusive and inefficient. Many times they don’t even look like advertising.

An app developer can easily get lost, and understandably so, in the jungle of ad networks, each claiming billions of impressions per week, with different pricing structures, ad units, tracking technologies (when they work) and little commitment on results.

Paid app discovery is very hard and (to be successful) very expensive. It is not just not enough to buy advertising to succeed — thousands of developers do. It is complex, time consuming and expensive to run an efficient mobile ad campaign.

Bottom line

You can’t attribute the (lack of) success of an app just to one single factor. Building a business with a mobile app is hard, because it involves a long list of parameters very few developers really understand or can control.

We’re in the early days of the mobile app business. There is no “magic recipe” for mobile app success. It is more about experimentation than following a prescribed list of directions.

And everyone can learn how to cook this way. Those who make it will try and fail until they succeed. 

Ouriel Ohayon is the cofounder of Appsfire, a discovery and promotion network for mobile apps. Prior to Appsfire, he founded the French edition of Techcrunch and ran early stage investments for Lightspeed Ventures and Gemini Israel funds.

For more on this topic, attend GigaOM’s Mobilize conference, where Ouriel Ohayon will take part in an onstage conversation about how developers can disrupt the app distribution model. (September 20 – 21, San Francisco)

Image courtesy of Flickr user vikasiamoto.

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The latest crop of startups are trying to use new approaches and data to make the process of finding apps more intelligent and relevant for users. Companies like Xyologic, AppHero and AppAide are hoping to show there’s still plenty of room to innovate in this market though we’ll have to see if any of them can find traction.

Xyologic brings order to app searches

Xyologic, a Berlin-based startup, first got attention as an app analytics company, but last month opened up a consumer business with its beta app search engine. The search engine organizes apps into 700 categories, which is helpful in starting and refining searches. Xyologic also has 100 game genres that users can choose from.

The idea is that while some people might search for a developer by name, most people don’t know exactly what they’re searching for and don’t know how to phrase their searches to find what they want. So as they initiate their query, the additional categories help users narrow down their search to the categories that are appropriate.

Xyologic, which works on Android for now and is moving to iOS soon, also highlights apps that are good but often overlooked. The company has developed its own app scoring system that takes into account user ratings, comments and download figures.

AppHero builds recommendations based on your personality

AppHero for iOS takes a different approach from other recommendation services that often look at the apps a person or their friends have already downloaded. AppHero takes that into account but it focuses on what it can learn from a user’s Facebook activity, including liked pages, interests, updates and shared content. By analyzing this activity and matching it up to suggested apps, AppHero can attempt to surface apps based on a user’s personality.

AppHero was built by Toronto developer Jordan Satok, who also created App of the Day, which let a community of users recommend an app for each day. But Satok realized that blanket recommendations aren’t very helpful for a lot of people because they don’t speak to their particular interests.

AppHero offers first-time users a list of recommended apps. And then it continues to work in the background, pushing out new recommendations based on a user’s activity. If a person, for example, checks in from an airport, AppHero might recommend a good travel app. The service can get smarter over time by observing more Facebook activity and noting what apps a user downloads or decides they’re not interested in.

AppAide finds what people are actually using

AppAide, another iOS app, looks beyond what apps are being downloaded or which apps are popular with your friends. Instead, it tries to see what apps are actually in use. So when users download AppAide, they are contributing their usage stats to the larger AppAide community, which gets trending alerts when one app is being used a lot.

This helps address some of the problems with existing app stores, which can favor downloads. But downloads can be manipulated through big marketing campaigns or hype and that metric doesn’t always reflect what people are really doing.

AppAide is limited by its smaller audience, but it provides a pretty accurate picture of what’s popular now. And it shows some apps that are not well known. The service anonymizes user data and it doesn’t hurt battery performance, said Cody Barbierri, a former VentureBeat writer and the founder of Betabait, which makes AppAide. Down the road, AppAide is looking at offering its usage data to developers to help them see how their apps are being used.

These services will need to compete with existing tools like Appsfire, Quixey, Crosswalk and others along with newer app discovery services from Tapjoy, Fiksu and App-o-day. And they’ll also need to contend with Apple’s more robust app search and recommendations in iOS 6 thanks to its Chomp acquisition. It’s not going to be easy for these news discovery services to stand out, echoing the plight of the mobile apps they’re trying to highlight. But I think these new entrants show some of the different ways that you can optimize search and recommendations.

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Forstall provided no details at the developer conference and didn’t dwell on the topic, but the lack of emphasis on his part doesn’t accurately reflect how important those changes are going to be for both developers and users.

In the below screenshot grabbed from a developer video of the changes, you can see what a search results page looks like in the new iOS App Store. Instead of the current list-like results page showing just the app name and icon, you will get a series of cards that display much more information about apps your search has turned up: screenshots of the app, name, rating, price. It’s more similar to the results you get when searching the App Store in iTunes on Mac OS X, but designed for touchscreens, with those big, easily tappable buttons. (This, along with some behind-the-scenes search algorithm stuff, is what Chomp brought with it to Apple.)

Screenshot from iPodUplink video

Another really big change is the emphasis Apple is going to place on the Genius function of the App Store. The button has been moved to the middle and is likely going to be central to how users interact with the store from now on. Rather than having it hidden away as one option, Apple is going to take the data it already has about what apps you like based on what you’ve downloaded and use that to recommend other apps.

This has been the App Store’s biggest weakness. Apple has the largest mobile App Store around, and it has added search features, categories and even some human curation, but a huge challenge has remained: surfacing quality apps that are tailored to specific users. Right now, the emphasis in the App Store is on the most-downloaded apps, lists which have been dominated by larger, better known developers, and in the past have been easy to game.

Apple using the wealth of data it has is great for users and for developers who struggle to get their apps recognized or noticed in an App Store of 650,000 apps. However, the new focus on Genius recommendations probably will not be received as good news for the bevy of app discovery apps and services that have cropped up over the last few years designed specifically to solve this problem.

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The company said, somewhat controversially, that Apple’s app search was lacking, leaving users largely dependent on Top 25 lists that tend to reflect the size of the developer’s marketing budget more than they do relevance to the users’ needs.

It’s not the first time someone has highlighted a problem here. Indeed, there are a few companies trying to target a perceived need for app discovery. Appsfire and Quixey spring to mind, as – of course – does Chomp, which Apple bought earlier this year.

But another service that has been gearing up for around two years is Berlin-based Xyologic, whose Xyo service went into closed beta on Thursday (you can request an invite here).

Xyologic’s big selling point is the way its technology classifies apps into relatively specific genres – a strategy that it says makes it possible to understand even vaguely-expressed search queries. In a recent blog post, the firm said its work so far has shown:

• only five percent of app search queries are for specific usage functions.
• a similar amount are for specific app names.
• the vast majority are category searches.

So, using its proprietary ‘natural app category’ tech, the company has defined more than 700 app genres and more than 100 game genres. It also claims to “put some of the best and often undiscovered apps on top of the search result rankings”, and says it can make it easier for users to evaluate the quality of an app.

Right now, the Xyo beta covers Android, although iOS is coming soon. Xyologic also announced a funding round (amount undisclosed), from investors including Signia Venture Partners, Gameforge founder Klaas Kersting and Soundcloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss. Xyologic CEO Matthäus Krzykowski told me:

“This is the first app search that aims at the mainstream user. Our approach is unique in this sense that, in the last two years, we have gathered information on how users search for apps, what queries they type, how they behave.”

So how bad is the app discovery problem, really? According to Krzykowski, 0.1 percent of apps get 50 percent of the downloads.

“The situation is pretty similar on all platforms, albeit slightly better on iOS,” he added.

Sure, Krzykowski has a vested interest in pointing this out. But, at the same time, this kind of information is what’s kept the company afloat during its initial, pre-launch two years of operations. Until this new investment round, Xyologic has bootstrapped and supported itself by selling data and reports.

“We also tested older versions of our app search in partnerships with third parties where we split up the advertising revenue. We used this money to fund our innovation in app search,” Krzykowski noted, adding that, in terms of future revenues, “you will see innovative approaches to app marketing”.

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Verizon is offering up the gaming client through its Verizon apps portal. It’s available as a free download and, after an initial free trial, the subscription fee will be charged to customers’ monthly bills.

Verizon has been gradually adding more content to its app store in an attempt to assert more control – and make more money from – its smartphone portfolio. Last month it rolled out an ambitious video search app, called Viewdini, which aggregates content from across premium content platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Comcast’s Xfinity. The Exent deal, though, is a unique take on the carrier-developer partnership.

It’s not technically exclusive: Customers can download the app online, but it isn’t available through the Google Play store. So in addition to offering carrier-billing features to its partner, Verizon gives Exent a distribution channel that increases its chances of discovery. Verizon is surely getting compensated for that arrangement, though financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

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