[Tloewald]

And of course before the app store there was no low quality junk.

Frankly the problem with the app store is app discovery (something apple clearly understands). The emphasis is on (a) stuff that makes money, (b) stuff that gets downloaded a lot, (c) stuff that lots of people like. Once you go into niches it's insanely hard to FIND things. And if something looks intriguing but is expensive, there's no free trial mechanism.

If the app store fixed the discovery problem (and supported free trials) I think most of these issues would go away.

There's nothing wrong with a flood of free stuff, much of which is crap, and a ton of good cheap stuff aimed at broad markets ... This is actually a sign of progress.

[cageface]

Before the app store everybody was comfortable with the idea that software was not a generic commodity sold at a fixed price. Discovery is also a big problem in the app store, but it's orthogonal to price expectations.

[waqf]

Discovery of free apps can be accomplished by downloading all of them and finding out which ones (if any) suit you.

This method sucks, but it sucks much less than paying $2 for each of them and finding out which ones (if any) suit you. That's why they don't seem like orthogonal problems to me.