[jonhendry]

If the developers who made these apps were, instead, writing novels of similar quality, their work would have been coldly rejected by publisher after publisher after publisher after publisher.

1. If you're going to create, you need a thick skin for rejection and criticism, constructive or otherwise.

2. Everyone has a certain amount of shitty work that they need to work out of their system before they get good. If nobody tells them their crap work is crappy, they'll probably keep making it like that and won't improve.

3. Even successful novelists can get to a point where they stop being edited, and their work from that point tends to be flabby, overlong, and not well-regarded compared to earlier work that actually was edited.

[FiddlerClamp]

Nowadays they'd self-publish and would only have to worry about reviews from people who bought the book from Amazon (and many of them stack their book reviews with friends and family).

[jonhendry]

Well, that would be an option, but they probably wouldn't make much money, they wouldn't get the marketing support, and they wouldn't get the prestige of having published.

But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.