[kraigspear]

This type of article comes out a few times a year.

Comparing to the Web. How many new web sites are brought up each day, and out of those how many will gain significant traffic, and generate any significant revenue?

But finding Apps is hard? Yes it could be better, but you can use the Web to your harts content to promote your App which is searchable, assuming that's the problem.

This makes me think of the guy who did the Carrot weather App. An independent developer that took an over saturated category and did something unique.

At the same time thousands of weather Apps, that all look like clones of each other where submitted to the App Store, and nobody cares, but the problem is the App Store right?

[w0utert]

There's always a handful exceptions to the general rule, Flappy Bird being another example.

You only need to take a quick glance at the top selling/top grossing charts in the app store each day to see that the ecosystem for mobile apps is completely broken (at least on iOS, don't know about Android but I would be surprised if it were any different). There's literally hundreds if not thousands of alternatives for each app in the top spots of the charts that are objectively better, but practically speaking undiscoverable. At least if you count out Apple's own apps and those made by Facebook, Google, et al.

IMO someone (Apple or Google) needs to step up and re-invent the mobile app ecosystem, as it's in their own best interest to attract more diverse, higher quality applications, instead of having a handful of big developers suck all the air out of the room. Right now, they're doing a lousy job by just dumping the most downloaded apps into a few categories and calling it a day.

I imagine some beautiful, innovative discovery and distribution ecosystem for mobile apps that provides equal chances for large and small developers, and really lets users discover quality content, instead of funneling them into a handful of 'top 10' list and pretending those are 'the best', 'the most valuable', 'the most fun', etc...

[devit]

What's wrong with search?

If you want, say, a calendar app, search for "calendar" both in the App/Play Store and on Google or Bing (along with "android" or "ios").

You'll usually find a bunch of link to apps, plus several webpages reviewing several of them.

Once you find the names of some popular apps, you can also put all their names on a web search and find more webpages comparing them.

It works just like searching for anything else.

[kraigspear]

Success is the exception to the general rule for most business endeavors.

[Maascamp]

An important difference with the web is the barrier to entry. Testing an idea for the web is orders of magnitude cheaper (time and money) than an idea for an app.