Make Explore page more interesting
While it's much better than it used to be, our Explore page is still not a great destination for discovering cool new apps. I think these are some of the primary reasons:
- Editor's Choice is the first group, which is particularly bad because it's largely static and quite a few of the apps in this group (at least on F37) have low quality icons, metadata, and ugly interfaces (Calibre, GNU Cash, PDF Mod, etc.)
- We have New & Updated, but this category does not seem to get updated as frequently as the Flathub website, and also feels stale sometimes. In addition, many of the apps featured here are of very low quality, since there's no filtering of these apps
- There's no way to see more apps in the Editor's Choice and New & Updated groups, like there is on the Flathub website
- Opening a category sub-page takes ~10 seconds, which makes browsing around a pain. Opening categories should feel frictionless, otherwise we don't invite exploration
A few possible first steps towards improving this:
- Drop Editor's Choice until we can have a server-side curated apps list that changes at least once a week. If the first section on the Explore page is boring, the page is not really doing its job.
- Split "New & Updated" up into "New Apps" and "Recently Updated", like on beta.flathub.org. This would make the page feel a bit more lively, and give newly added apps a bit more time on the Explore page.
- Add sub-pages to see more new/recently updated apps, like on the Flathub website
- Introduce the concept of a "primary" repo, which would be explicitly responsible for the Explore experience. Only apps from this repo would show up on the Explore page, and it could control exactly what curated content shows up on the page at any given time, allowing for an actual curated experience and parity with e.g. the Flathub website.
- The primary repo could provide a frequently updated Editor's Choice list, and filter out low-quality apps out from being visible in the Recently Updated list, in order to ensure a good first impression.
- Fix the slow category loading #1342 (closed)
This is based on my experience with Fedora 37, I know some of this can differ depending on the distribution.
Edited by Tobias Bernard