Finding one needle in all the haystacks in the universe.

Damn there are so many new bad amateurish simple games in the iTunes App Store everyday. They seem like they were coded by 8-year-olds. It is almost impossible to find the good games. Anyone who has a day of coding experience under his belt can put a game there. I'm starting to think that it should be licensed and only people with a few years of coding under their belt and who has achieved a specified level of competence should be allowed to sell their games. Either that or there should be two categories: Good Games, and Shit Games.

Well at the moment apple thinks it helps sells there phone. The make most of the money on the hardware and they want to prove they have loads of apps for it.

If they did seperate the apps then there would be like 5000 in the good category and 700000 in the shit one.

Maybe at some point they will decide its quality and not quantity.

They already do. That's one of the differences between iOS and Android.

I agree that it'd be nice if there were 2 tiers. The bottom tier would be basically what's there now... meaning minimal checks and requirements to be allowed into the App Store. The top tier would have higher standards and possibly even a per-app submission fee. This alone would cut down on the thousands of crapware that gets shoveled into the store every week.

Of course the question then becomes what exactly would the top-tier requirement and standards be. I dont have an answer to this, as it would almost certainly involve a certain amount of subjectivity. Anything that you could think of that would not be subjective on the part of reviewers would lend itself to gaming of the system very easily.

I have an easy answer. It should cost $1,000 to submit a new app to the store. If it's nor capable of making that much, it's because it's shite. But that figure is also easily affordable to a serious dev and ridiculous to those just punting out "my first snake"

I like the vast selection and enjoy spending time scanning the app store trying to find some 'hidden' gem. Yes there appears (to me) to be a lot of rubbish games yet on the other hand people have such varied tastes.

A lot of games i cant stand (Angry Birds/Tiny Wings) are huge huge hits !

Then theres games i love (old retro style graphics which seem to turn a lot of kids off) and kids hate them.

To me a platformer has left/right/jump buttons, seems a platformer on iOS is an endless runner with one button to jump.

So i think 'keep the crap in' as we all have different tastes, theres screenshots/youtube/reviews to check and if after that you take a chance and the games rubbish you've lost a dollar or so (thank god its not like the 80's where you wasted $12 on hard earned pocket money on some bad title)

I just use the Popular tab in AppShopper I filter out the crap.

Apple's own guidelines contain an "amateur hour" clause (quoted verbatim) warning that "cobbled together" or "practice" apps will get rejected. But the reviewers let in new garbage/reskins/templates/scams daily. I'd hate to see the crap they actually reject!

I agree that any decent game/app will make this much back eventually, but it's still daunting for an indie to pay this much up front. Because of the nature of the App Store even good games can be buried by the crap, and so even good games can make very little. A good game that might make a couple thousand dollars will now see it's income drop by 50%. So, this would discourage crap but also good games from small indie devs.

But like I said before, adding even a small(ish) fee will get rid of a ton of the crap, say around $100. Then add stricter review standards. Finally, you could have the 2-tier thing, but allow games/apps to enter the top tier by being popular in the App Store. So, take your $1000 requirement... what if a game has to make $1000 in order to make it to the "top tier"? Now we have a decent system... we've cut out a lot of the crap and have an unbiased method (relies on sales numbers) to move "good" games to a higher more visible tier.

It's interesting that you guys are advocating more strict control over apps in the App Store. As a dev, I wish Apple would stop telling us what to do (for instance not being able to download and run LUA code from the web, according to the TOS).

To me, wading through the crap is an app discoverability problem. Google might have a slight edge there, they already have the search technology. I don't see too many apps being a problem, as long as the crap is buried deep in the store and the good stuff floats to the top (like Google search rankings).