5 best apps for Windows Phone Store bargain hunters
These days, loads of fresh and interesting apps for our Windows smartphones are cropping up all the time. The trouble really isn’t about finding fab apps, but making sure we don’t go over budget in our app-hungry enthusiasm.
While the Windows Phone Store is full of excellent deals, it ranks its contents by approximate release date and popularity, so there’s no way to search by price or price-drops. But happily, in case you thought you had to rely on world of mouth or check manually and wait patiently for your favourite app to go on special offer, you were wrong. It took us some time to discover this, too, but to our great pleasure, several developers have come up with apps that hunt out and highlight money-off bargains. Here’s our five cool cash-saving favourites:
AppDeals
Publishers and developers push deal notifications straight to these guys, and they send them on to their users. You can get news about new deals via email or push notification, or pin the app to your Start Screen: the Live Tile will allows display the latest offer. Open the app and you’ll see the ten most recent deals – each entry shows the discount and how long the offer is running for. Click on the app and you’ll be brought to the Windows Store. Easy as that.
Store Deals
This has a busier interface than AppDeals, but it gives quite a lot of info, so it might be more useful for people who really, really want to find a lot of special offers! The start page shows you the most popular new offers by date – names, original and discounted prices, and the app’s star-rating from the Windows Phone Store. As usual, click through to go to the store itself. Scroll down and you’ll see that the archive goes back several weeks, so it’s pretty comprehensive, and it’ll always say so if the offer has expired (you can hide expired deals if you prefer). Swipe right for apps that have dropped to free, right again for top-rated apps on offer, right again for Xbox Live deals, right again for deals. An all-round top-notch service, though without the notifications offered by AppDeals.
MyAppFree
This is a neat service that lets its subscribers download one app free each day. The daily featured app is the first thing you’ll see when you launch the app, and the deals can be really superb. If you swipe right, you’ll see a selection of discounted deals, which are generally apps with 50% or 60% off. MyAppFree also offers push notifications so you don’t miss a spectacular bargain by forgetting to check in. It’s more basic than some of the other services, but with a guaranteed new deal each day, we’re fans.
Red Stripe Deals
Every week, there are six specially discounted games or apps on the Windows Phone Store as part of the Xbox Red Stripe Deal offer, and this brand new app is a really handy way of getting to hear about them. It features the six apps on offer for Windows as well as for Windows Phone, but for our purposes, it’s particularly handy if you’re after games and apps for your smartphone. Click on the offer of your choice and it’ll give you a blurb and the chance to click through to the Store. Warning: prices display in US dollars, so make sure you check your own currency when you click on through.
App Social
This is a Nokia app that offers a new way to browse the Store – you can follow other users, create lists, and see what’s just been released. While it’s not specifically a deal-finder, plenty of its users are interested in special offers, and so if you flick to the ‘App Feed’ section you’ll see users adding apps to their own curated deals lists. Follow those lists for updated tip-offs about discounted or ‘gone free’ apps, and click on the listed apps to go to the Store and download. You can pin lists to the Start Screen for quick access. Handy!
Being app addicts for both personal and professional reasons, we think these bargain-hunting buddies rock. What about you? Have you used any of them before and if so, what did you think? Can you think of other apps that’ll help us get our Lumia-swiping hands on more offers? If you’re in the know, please share your secrets with us in the comments below. Deal? We hope so.