A social mobile network enables discovery of application programs running on the mobile devices. A search for partial or full matches to a group of alphanumeric characters is performed on the data stored on the first mobile communication device on which the search is initiated. The search is also performed on data made available to the user of the first mobile communication device by other users, where each user is associated with a different one of a multitude of mobile communication devices. The sharing of the data and the search for shared data is made via a server with which the mobile communication devices are in communication. The discovery of applications whose names or descriptions are partially or fully matched to the alphanumeric characters is made despite the fact that user was not looking for or aware of the existence of such application programs.