In this golden age for mobile apps, the boundaries of creativity are being pushed further every day. In a consumer era where the mini-computers we call smartphones have found their way into everyone's pocket, it has become inevitable that interactive shopping and customer-loyalty apps would catch the interest of manufacturers, shopping centres, independent entrepreneurs, tech companies and brands across Turkey. We took a look at a handful of apps that are already live in this space, or planning to launch:

Mekanist

Mekanist, which lets users search and share their location across more than 100,000 venues — mostly food and drink spots — has been running with a user-friendly interface since 2008. Its review-and-rating feature has built up a database of comments and recommendations for thousands of venues nationwide, and it also gives access to each venue's phone number, fax, website and social media links. Venues can even give users small perks in response to their reviews. Also serving as a website at mekanist.net, the app functions as a first-rate venue search engine, bringing together people bored of visiting the same old places, people who want unbiased opinions on venues that fit their own criteria, and people who simply want to keep other users informed about the venues they visit.

Mekanist's fairly comprehensive User Search section lets you find other "mekanists" by first and last name, or discover users with tastes similar to yours to find new venues that suit you. There's also a Neighbourhood Search that lets you reach mekanists near you, ask questions about a venue you want to know more about, or simply visit it yourself and leave a rating.

The app's rating categories are split into four: taste, atmosphere, service, and value for money. As the first Turkish app on Android with check-in functionality, Mekanist offers users a unique experience through a range of features — from app permissions to a smooth interface, from Facebook integration to gallery layout, from its sign-up system to its overall practicality.

Mekanist also serves brands through a mobile loyalty platform built specifically for the food, drink and entertainment sector. First launched for Caffe Nero, its mobile loyalty solutions let brands run easy, effective loyalty programmes for customers through mobile devices.

Google Now

Google Now, an app designed to optimise shopping centres for the interactive world, is preparing to meet Turkish consumers. Launched by Google a while back, it's a genuine internet assistant. Regarded as an early version of the "artificial intelligence" we're used to seeing in futuristic sci-fi films, one of Google Now's most important features is using potential customers' own Google searches to alert them, as they walk around a shopping centre, that a product they've searched for is on sale nearby.

Say you're at work on a Friday, looking up a tennis racket as a birthday present for a friend whose birthday falls that weekend. You check the price and the specs, and after work you go round the shops at a mall weighing up gift options. Just as you're about to give up hope of finding anything, a notification lands on your phone: "Dundrop C-212 lightweight racket, at Sporter. Fancy a look?"

Store Scanning

Another feature that will boost shopping centres' interaction with end consumers is a store-finder that lets you search a mall's contents by voice or by text. With this feature, you'll be able to scan for stores from inside the mall — or anywhere else — and get directed straight to the one you want. Since the system also lets you search by store category, it will save customers the time they'd otherwise lose hunting for a shop.

Package Tracking for Online Shopping

The app also lets you track the delivery of products you've bought, right through to when they reach you. With Google Now, you can see how far a package has travelled in transit and its estimated arrival time — it's clear that, by bridging the gap between consumer and seller, Google Now is aiming to make shopping more tangible and deliver an interactive experience.

Despite its wide range of features, the app hasn't yet come into full use in Turkey — but once store infrastructure is in place, it could open a new chapter for direct sales.

Boni

Every brand wants to reward its loyal customers. Boni lets brands do just that, while also acting as a go-between to help them reach their target customers. This mobile loyalty app, currently active in 12 shopping centres in Turkey, has considerably widened the range of perks on offer to smartphone owners. Built around the promise of "earn as you browse," Boni has developed a rewards system where stores reward customers not just for buying, but simply for visiting. Through the free Boni app, brands award Boni points to customers who visit their stores. These points build up and give users the chance to claim a range of prizes from the Boni pool — coffee, bowling, watches, plane tickets and more.

As with Google Now, when customers like a product or piece of content, it gets surfaced again as a reminder once they're near the relevant store. That means every individual using the app becomes part of an interactive shopping system.

Boni's partner stores include:

Marmara Park, Metro City, Anatolium, Palladium, ANKAmall, Maltepe Park, Acity, 365, Tekira, Espark, NeoMarin and Vialand

Mudo Mobil

Built on the Shopamani platform, this app aims to give customers a combined online and offline shopping experience by scanning the barcode of a product they like in-store — and it made the final of the "Best In-Store Payment Solutions" category at Payment Awards 2013, the UK's first-ever competition for card and payment technologies, alongside international brands. As well as keeping you up to date on every campaign and personalised offer, it lets you scan a product's barcode with your camera to drop it straight into your basket. You can also find out which store has an out-of-stock item without asking a second person, and earn points that you can then spend on purchases.

Yuppi

A location-based app, Yuppi turns browsing and shopping into a game, earning customers points without boring them or burying them in campaign messages. In some cases simply walking past a store is enough to earn points — all you have to do is keep the Yuppi app open. Walk into the store of a brand carrying the Yuppi icon and you can earn even more points at the till.

— Points were collected in more than 7,000 stores across a total of 39 provinces,

— 35 separate products were viewed across 26 different provinces,

— 600,000 store visits were made,

— More than 11.5 million Yuppis were collected,

— Products were scanned and barcodes read 34,000 times,

— Yuppi was used most in Istanbul, İzmir, Bursa and Ankara,

— Users' age range was 16–38,

— 58% of users were women, 42% men,

— A total of 670 users won products across 10 different product groups, including 10 users winning an iPad and 80 winning Converse,

— The fastest person to win an iPad had used Yuppi for 57 days.

iCadde

The iCadde app is an alternative take on shopping. A non-commercial app, it lets you search for businesses along Bağdat Caddesi — one of the world's longest streets, spanning several districts — and pinpoint their location. Written by an independent developer who recognised that satellite-and-map-based apps like Google Maps sometimes fall short at locating the hundreds of businesses along the street, the app's core aim is to gather the names, addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, websites, map locations and directions of every shop, restaurant, café, bank, doctor, lawyer and anything else you can think of along Bağdat Caddesi into one usable database.

Blesh

Launched onto the smartphone market under the motto "right time, right place," iBeacon-powered Blesh is a location-based mobile marketing platform built to meet a wide range of needs. Running on Bluetooth® Smart, this technology lets businesses know about the users and customers present in an indoor space and act on that with marketing activity. The Blesh platform notifies a business the moment a customer walks through the door — or even just passes nearby. High accuracy at low cost make Blesh an excellent solution for indoor spaces; it can be described as low-energy data transfer. Once Blesh's iBeacon devices are placed indoors or outdoors, they broadcast radio signals around themselves, and any smartphone or tablet within range picks up those signals and interacts with them.

Built on Bluetooth Smart technology and first used commercially on the iPhone 4S, Blesh has also been adopted by Bluetooth 4.0, Samsung, HTC and other smart-technology makers, and is spreading rapidly. When a Blesh iBeacon device placed indoors or outdoors comes within 50 metres or closer of a smartphone, it lets a wide range of content be delivered to the customer through the app on their phone. The technology works especially well with Apple and Samsung devices running iOS and Android™. Another key feature of Blesh's iBeacon devices is a battery life approaching two years, letting them run continuously. This makes uninterrupted data transfer possible, which in turn keeps communication between customer and seller unbroken — opening the door to campaign notifications and customer data being captured without a gap.