We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Android’s shortcomings in game discovery. While the Apple App Store has its flaws, the Android Market does an even worse job of surfacing good games and apps. Google also has yet to match Apple’s announcement of Game Center, a forthcoming social network for iDevice gamers.

A Google solution may be best, but in the meantime, the private market is beginning to step in. Scoreloop, a mobile social platform, is first this morning with its its own game discovery app (we’ll have a story about a competing offering later this morning).

Scoreloop, like competitors OpenFeint and Plus+, plays mostly in the background. Game developers integrate it into their apps to add features like leaderboards, challenges and notifications. But since these companies end up with millions of user profiles, it also makes sense for them to branch out into social game discovery.

The new Scoreloop app has three tabs: Popular, New and Friends’ Games. The last of the three, showing which games your friends on the network are playing, is most important, according to CEO Marc Gumpinger. “Finding out what your friends are doing is a very good indication of what you might like — not just the games, but the activity stats for people playing those games,” he says.

It remains to be seen how many players will download a standalone game discovery app, but the number could be significant if finding good apps is as painful an experience on Android devices as some developers seem to think. The iPhone, meanwhile, is getting its own discovery apps; last week, Chomp released general-purpose app search for iDevices.

Scoreloop is also releasing its latest SDK for developers this morning. The newest features also have to do with discovery — most notably, a cross-promotion tab that game developers can add. Like Facebook’s cross-promotion strips, Scoreloop’s version will be based on an exchange; for each user clicking on a game promoted with your app, you’ll get one click back from the network.