[vineyardmike]

> we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps"

I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.

I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products. Which is generally what users want. Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed? I guess Google doesn’t see value in hosting and distributing such apps.

I’m not sure I agree with this, but I understand it. Target or Walmart don’t need to sell your random trinkets that no one buys, and Google is deciding that the same applies to their store. At least with Android you can generally side load and access alternative stores, so you can build a richer marketplace where different “stores” can serve different customers.

[duskwuff]

> Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed?

For what it's worth, the wording Apple uses in their App Review Guidelines [1] is:

> 4.3(b): Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

[redserk]

I’ll give credit to Apple for formally writing a policy to this extent, but it’s disappointing. There’s always the risk of putting in a lot of time for an app that is genuinely unique but Apple may not think so.

I’d much rather Apple let in junk apps but do more to promote curated lists of good apps. I like the “Editors Choice” section. I think it is generally a step in the right direction to surface decent apps.

Plus there’s also already some kind of precedent: Maps does an acceptable job promoting third-party “Guides” to attractions and food for many cities.

[duskwuff]

For what it's worth, that bit of the policy was written early in the life of the App Store, when there really was a glut of low-effort novelty apps, particularly in the categories they mentioned, and when app discovery features in the store were more limited. It's probably not as necessary nowadays, but it does help guide developers away from writing apps which users are unlikely to find useful. (And if you've genuinely put in the effort to create something novel, it shouldn't be difficult to convince the reviewer of that - App Store review is a two-way street.)

[ffsm8]

Don't you mean ocean into which you can throw your message in a bottle and occasionally get a response to? ◝ ( ⁰ ▿ ⁰ ) ◜

[pluto_modadic]

quoting from a nice piece: https://lmnt.me/blog/app-stores-and-payment-methods.html "It still blows my mind how little the App Store has improved over the last decade. It’s barely changed. Almost every bad thing about the App Store still exists. And almost every good thing that happened for app distribution and payment methods is just the result of regulation."

[tremon]

It's almost as if monopolies are bad for innovation. Who would've thunk.

[tekknik]

How can you not have a monopoly over something you create?

[fauigerzigerk]

I don't really understand this thinking. If a long tail of mostly unremarkable apps make the good ones hard to find then that is a flaw of the ranking algorithm.

If an app is not even in the app store, how can it possibly attract user interest? What if users happen to like some quirky feature that seems unremarkable to app store reviewers?

App stores need better search and filtering.

[Marsymars]

> App stores need better search and filtering.

I used to think this, but then I just abandoned their search and now use Kagi. (I use the !gp bang for the Play Store, no App Store bang seems to exist.)

I can't imagine ever going back to native store searches now that they're full of ads.

[fauigerzigerk]

Can Kagi filter apps by things like what permissions they require or by their monetisation model?

We need more than a search engine. We should be able to query the app store database using _all_ the properties that the app store knows.

On top of that we should be able to ask LLM style questions about the functionality of the app.

[Marsymars]

Sure, could be a neat feature, but practically, 95% of the time that I’m searching for an app I know the specific app I need already and am just searching by name. The !gp bang doesn’t search Kagi, it directs to the app with the matching name on the Play Store, but skips having to wade through ads to get there.

The other 5% of the time where I’m looking for an app for a particular function, there usually don’t exist enough apps that perform that function for filtering on search results to be worthwhile.

[cgriswald]

I’ve had some luck asking ChatGPT “How does AppX make money?” I’ve also asked it to find me games based on genre, style, and control constraints “without ads or with removable ads” and it does a fair job.

[Marsymars]

> I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.

It doesn't help much for Apple. You can search for pretty much anything on the App Store and get at best a handful of useful results, followed by page after page of complete dreck.

[aeve890]

>I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products.

Originality and quality are orthogonal.

[hedora]

I don’t get how FDroid can be so much better.

I’ve given up on Android, but when I used it, I always checked FDroid first.

[immibis]

Maybe because it's not owned by a revenue-maximizing advertising company.