[five18pm]

App discovery is a problem for consumers as well. My iPad does not show no more than ~40 games. I don't know if I am not looking hard enough or I just can't browse more than that what the app store app shows. I can search for an app, but I have to know the name of the app for that. So for me, if the app does not show in the app store app links, then the app pretty much does not exist.

If I do want a particular application, I search Google first than the app store. Most probably some one has already gone through the pains of finding an app and has talked about it online.

So discovery problem exists for app consumers as well. And there in lies a startup idea in app discovery but I wonder how Apple/Google would allow that.

[drivingmenuts]

Some anecdotal evidence: I went searching for an app that would stream the radio stations in iTunes. Several pages in, I ran into a ton of radio station streaming apps - they were the same app, each wrapping a different radio station.

After 10 pages of that, I gave up.

Searching the App Store or the Play is a painful experience whether you're just browsing around to find something interesting or if you're looking for something that does a specific thing. The categorization isn't fine-grained enough and the "curators" will pretty much let anything thru without showing any signs of quality or originality.

The desktop software market still suffers from this a little bit, but enough time has passed that some standards for quality have emerged from the general consciousness. You release a desktop app, there are some gold standards to compare to.

If anything, the app market is going to be incredibly painful for quite some time.

[mikaelcho]

Agree with this. App discovery is rough for devs and users. From a dev perspective, it's hard to stick out. There's some fantastic apps out there that get lost in all the noise.

From a user perspective, the goal of discovery is to find the best apps that match my interests. This goal is hard to reach because of a poor user experience paired with inefficiencies in search and the download process.

It's this culmination of factors that makes app discovery a headache.