This is pretty awful.

The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.

It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.

All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.

I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.

I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.

I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.

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georgeecollins a day ago | parent | next [-]

Undermining the power of software vendors is an institutional imperative at Apple. There is a memory of the days when they were dependent on Adobe and Microsoft for their hardware to be viable. When they design App stores they make the rules and game the system with this in mind.

It's not just that the stores are open to everyone-- shovelware and all. Steam does that but because they care about the ecosystem they protect pricing for premium products. They make reviews and recommendations relevant. Try to get your terrible knock off of a hit game come up in a search-- they are on to that.

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PaulHoule a day ago | parent [-]

It's notable that other attempts to develop game app stores for non-console platforms have fallen flat. If Microsoft has gotten any traction at all for game distribution on Windows it's because of the really different GAME PASS model. Blizzard, EA and such have apps to download their own games but don't challenge Steam for third parties, Good Old Games with it's anti-DRM stance is the only real competitor.

Steam is a model of integrity and it's a good thing that it's not for sale because it would be an obvious acquisition for irrelevant players like Gamestop who want be relevant today, it would have been a better acquisition for Microsoft than Activision but any acquirer would kill it one way or the other by violating its integrity.

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skydhash a day ago | parent [-]

Integrity is always what makes curation relevant.

	▲	benoau 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And to that note, Apple testified a 75% profit margin on these fees due to what the judge in the Epic case called out as limited investment in the review process or tools to improve it. Or as Phil Schiller called out years before that, "is anyone watching the store?!".

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siva7 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still remember that marketplace from Openai, the gpt store for Chatgpt? They had zero quality control for the apps. They had millions of gpt "apps", 99.99% of them complete garbage. Vibe coding Apps has become so easy nowadays that every idiot and first grader can prompt its way through a store release. Pure spam. I would love to see a marketplace that rejects at least half of all app submissions. Google got lots of backlash on HN for requiring a DUNS number from now on to keep your app on their store - but how do you want to keep those sweatshops and idiots from spamming your store?

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jjcob a day ago | parent [-]

Apple already rejects a lot of apps. Half of my submissions are rejected for bullshit reasons (eg. I submitted an app that shows data from health kit, and it was initially rejected for unnecessarily using health kit)

The problem is that they don't do any curation. They should allow all apps on the store, but make a proper search engine. That surfaces good apps and hides shovelware.

But unfortunately they suck at it.

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rustystump 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had one app that was not super original pass first go and another which was pretty original get rejected 8 times before it passed. It is all a game.

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mc3301 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is a terrible mystery why search and filtering are so utterly bad in the app store.

	▲	macintux 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No kidding. I just wanted to find out what apps are compatible with CarPlay. You’d think that would be a simple filter. If it’s there, I sure can’t find it.

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agnishom 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am fine with this. I don't see why Apple or anyone should go around policing what people install on their phones, malware or not.

There is a reliable way to find the ChatGPT app. That is by going to the actual first party website, and following appropriate links.

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dylan604 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.

At least the junk apps are not stolen from someone and being resold in the app store as a fence.

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kryptiskt a day ago | parent | next [-]

There are plenty of apps that are plain ripoffs, and lifting assets from the apps they imitate.

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dylan604 a day ago | parent [-]

I think we're willfully ignoring the actual point here though

	▲	Xss3 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think his comparison was apt and your 'at least' is a false dichotomy.
	▲	saghm 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or just disagreeing with it

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ChrisMarshallNY a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Not so sure about that. I am not into searching for it, but I read, somewhere, that abandoned apps are being stolen, or brought for pennies, then resold (sometimes, with some “extra spice”).

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scotty79 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores;

They have been for at least a decade, maybe forever.

Content discovery and selection is still unsolved problem. Steam might be doing the best job but still imperfect.

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unscaled a day ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's an unsolved problem. The fact that Steam and doesn't overwhelm you with 100 low-effort ripoffs when you're searching for AAA game means it's possible, at the very least, to get that bare minimum done.

I feel this is particularly egregious with the Mac App store, since Apple requires manual reviews for all apps. It's just that that the things Apple seem to care about in these review don't really seem to improve user-facing quality very much compared to app store with a more lenient review process.

	▲	xp84 a day ago \| parent [-]
		> things Apple seem to care about in these review Yes! It's so glaring the difference between how they position App Review in court or in marketing materials, which is always about quality and safety, and how it is used in practice 99% of the time, which is "Does it pose any threat to an Apple business model?" (e.g. Spotify isn't a threat as long as it's hobbled by paying 30% App Store tax that Apple Music doesn't have to). XBOX Game Pass was a threat because they don't want games being sold where nobody has paid Apple a cut for each game. "You wouldn't want finding apps to be as much of a minefield as downloading programs off the Web used to be, would you?" they say. "Our curation is the only reason you are safe from malware on an iPhone!" It only takes a search or two on either "App Store" to see that they have no problem with apps whose business models could not possibly succeed without deception, such as simple calculators or wallpaper image catalogs with $19.99 weekly subscriptions after free trial. It's interesting to me that Apple have been pioneers in two separate areas: 1. sandboxing and permissions, which arguably they have done a B+ job at. Not as fine-grained as Android in most ways, but better at what it does do than anything else for consumers. 2. App Store gatekeeping. They want us to believe their platforms are only secure because of #2 but I think they're pretty darn secure just because of #1 and #2 has basically no relevance due to how lax they are about the things that I care about, which is basically scams and knock-offs.

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FireBeyond a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The RDF means that Apple still has the "sideloading needs to be blocked, because Apple keeps the garbage that infests Android off my grandma's iPhone, and we like it that way".

No, there's plenty of absolute garbage and problematic things in the App Store.