[rossjudson]

Steam already has curators/curation lists exactly like you describe. They are usually not particularly interesting.

Anyone can make a web page with apps they think are great, and links to those apps that will go straight to store pages. Very few people do.

These are done rarely because there's little or no money in it. Give the curators a significant cut, and now you have a lot of curators and a lot of gaming of the system.

Now you need to curate the curators, which is still a significant problem.

Throughout all of that, you'll have those claiming that curation is censorship. They don't matter because you can never satisfy them.

Who ensures security in decentralized app stores? Curators, independently? Or can they "inherit" that from the major app stores?

None of this is anywhere near simple.

[eighthave]

With free software and reproducible builds, it is possible for small scale curators to inherit the security of the large scale curators. That is why they are key pieces of the f-droid.org collection.