Think about it this way, you can crank out 10 apps a month and your bills get paid OR you can work on one app for 6 months and risk crashing and burning or even getting rejected. Its not to hard to see why the apps are low quality. Its a symptom of the iphone app market.

The console game industry has the cure to this but it isn't pretty: $30k dev kits, minimum funding/budget requirements, and long approval processes

Personally I would rather stick with the current apple approach. The crap apps are cheap (or free) and if you have the guts to make a serious app its easier to stand out.

So RussB is looking at the summary of all these apps and declaring them crap? Sounds something like the flood of bogus app reviews in iTunes put there by people who haven't even downloaded the apps.

But he has a point - In a (somewhat) open catalog like the App Store, we as users desperately need a better filtering mechanism than the one iTunes currently has. The answer isn't to restrict app entries to someone's definition of quality or marketability, but to provide tools to make the user's decision making process simpler.

I think there's a startup opportunity in there somewhere.

This is another problem with apples 'App Store Only' policy. If they weren't the only possible provider of Apps then they could legitimately reject ones they didn't like. The authors would just have to sell it somewhere else. But because they are determining whether an app can exist on the platform they have to be a lot more carefull about what they reject.

So far, Apple has done a pretty poor job of managing the store. Look at all the '...zomg, you're charging for this!!?!!1!eleven' "review" posts.

I'm hoping they throw someone at the project that has some common sense.

I agree with the article and probably with you too on the large number of low-quality applications, but there is no obvious solution to the problem of decreasing quality coming with an increasingly large population (of developers, of HN users, of Usenet posters...)

In your opinion, what would common sense be in that case? Apple got criticized for censoring applications; True, that was because these applications were competing with Apple's own services, but the move still sent a strong message. Apple will probably want to retain a large control over what can go on an iPhone (hint: Flash wouldn't), and an arbitrary decision on what is acceptable or not in terms of quality can be a very bad thing. IMHO, the review process is probably the best hope in this case, the first few people buying an application rating it to warn (or invite) other customers.

There is a great solution... Only accept high quality apps but then let developers distribute on their own. That way all the stupid repackaged public domain books can be sold, but don't have to litter the app store.

I think every open store will have the same set of "crapp".

One man's crap app is another man's treasure app.