About Oddities

Oddities is a curated directory of exceptional small web applications—tools that are odd, delightful, and often overlooked by mainstream app stores. We catalog what’s good, measure what matters, and make it discoverable.

Our Mission

The web has become a graveyard of forgotten tools. Brilliant apps—built by individuals and small teams—disappear into the noise because they lack the marketing budgets of venture-backed platforms. Oddities exists to shine a light on quality over volume, curation over algorithmic rankings.

We believe small web apps represent the future of software: fast, focused, and free from corporate bloat. Our job is to find them, measure them fairly, and connect them with people who need them.

What Gets Listed

Criteria

•Web-based: Runs in a browser. No native desktop or mobile apps.
•Functional: The app works. It solves a real problem or demonstrates a genuine capability.
•Small: Built by one person or a tiny team, not a corporate engineering department.
•Intentional: Shows care in design and execution, even if imperfect.
•Accessible: No paywall or closed beta. Anyone can try it right now.

What we exclude

•Dead or broken apps: If it doesn’t work, it stays off the list.
•AI-generated content: We detect and exclude apps built from template AI content with no human intent.
•Scams or malware: Security checks are automatic and ongoing.
•Big company marketing: If it’s made by Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., it’s likely listed elsewhere.

How We Score Quality

Every app in Oddities receives an automated quality score on a scale of 0–100, computed by our crawler every week. The score is composite and transparent, weighted across six factors:

Performance (15%)

Web Vitals

Measured via Lighthouse: First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Total Blocking Time, and Speed Index. A fast app is a respectful app.

Security (15%)

Trust & Safety

SSL/TLS validity, malware detection, and phishing screening. A secure app is a trustworthy app.

SEO (10%)

Discoverability

Proper metadata, structured data, and crawlability. Good SEO means your app can be found.

Accessibility (10%)

Usability for All

WCAG compliance, keyboard navigation, and screen reader support. Accessibility is not an afterthought.

Authenticity (25%)

Human-Made vs. AI Slop

Detection of AI-generated content, template clones, and low-effort builds. We favor apps built with intention and care. Higher score = more authentic and original.

Effort (25%)

Craft & Polish

Visual design, interaction quality, attention to detail, and coherence of the product. Derived from the app itself, not from external reviews.

Current data: We catalog 624 apps. Quality scores range from 13 to 93, with a mean of 57. Every score is generated by code; methodology is not a black box.

How Often We Check Apps

The Oddities crawler runs on a scheduled basis to verify that apps are still live, working, and haven’t regressed in quality. Once an app is listed, we re-check:

•Weekly crawls: Full quality score recalculation (performance, security, SEO, accessibility, authenticity, effort). This is the public score you see.
•Continuous security monitoring: Automated malware, phishing, and SSL/TLS checks run independently of the weekly crawl.
•Monthly availability audits: Verification that apps are still live and responding.

If an app breaks, we mark it as dead. If it comes back, we restore it. If it receives zero user ratings for a year, we archive it quietly to keep the catalog fresh.

Get Your App Listed

We discover apps three ways:

1. Automated Discovery

The Oddities crawler hunts for exceptional small web apps across the internet using signals like Hacker News, Product Hunt, indie dev communities, and GitHub. If your app is good enough, we’ll find it.

2. Submit Your App

You can submit an app directly. We accept submissions from builders, maintainers, and enthusiasts. Submit here: oddities.app/submit

Submissions are manually reviewed. We’ll evaluate whether your app meets our quality bar. If it does, it goes live immediately. If it doesn’t, we’ll explain why.

3. Claim Your Listing

If your app is already listed on Oddities, you can claim it to manage your page. Add screenshots, update your description, and respond to community feedback.

Go to: oddities.app/claim

For Site Owners: Crawler Information

The Oddities crawler visits your site to evaluate it for listing. Here’s what you need to know:

User-Agent:

Oddities-Crawler/1.0 (+https://oddities.app/about)

Request Frequency:

~2–4 requests per month per app, plus weekly security checks.

What We Measure:

Page load performance, visual rendering, interactive elements, security headers, SSL/TLS validity, and malware presence.

Robots.txt Compliance:

We respect standard robots.txt directives. If you want to block the Oddities crawler, add:

User-Agent: Oddities-Crawler
Disallow: /

Contact:

If you have questions about the crawler or want to request an exclusion, email us at crawler@oddities.app

Our Philosophy

We’re not building another App Store. We’re not chasing engagement metrics or selling data. Oddities is small by design: our job is to recommend, not to extract.

Quality is subjective, but measurable. We score transparently so you can disagree with our scoring methodology—and if you do, you can audit it. The most valuable thing we can offer is a catalog you trust, built by people who believe small web apps deserve their spotlight.

This site exists to amplify voices that otherwise go unheard. If that sounds good to you, welcome to Oddities.