Safari or Chrome could be a 'pirate streaming app', right? Would app stores allow a web browser with pirate sites bookmarked by default?
Microsoft has zero quality controls and their store is full of shit, which is one of the reasons their platform failed so hard. They were literally paying people per app published regardless of the content of it. It turns out just advertising that you have a billion apps doesn't help if they're all just junk.
This and the fact that the application itself is quite terrible.
Edit: Also, for desktop apps the pricing model without paid upgrades is not viable. Compared to mobile, there are too few customers.
The biggest hurdle in the macOS App Store is the stiff sandboxing rules that make the more exotic and often useful utilities incompatible.
Nope. The really big hurdle is the 30% cut that Apple wants to take.
For smaller devs the store should provide a better marketing and sales platform, and so be worth the 30% cut. Steam, as an example, seems to work out alright for most companies but not everyone.
Google Play Store is a lot better than it was in the past, but the problem I find now is due to the sheer number of android devices, you just don't get the consistency while running apps that you get on iOS App Store. I assume this is the same for Kindle since it is android-based and Windows Store since there is so much hardware out there.
Very true. Once you delve into some of the category pages, or the search, you find many many pages of utter garbage. But the 'front page' experience is carefully curated to look like the cream of the crop.
I would much rather have to sift through garbage to find the app I want, then to have a company like apple tell me what I am allowed and not allowed to install on the device I paid them 100's or over a $1,000 to "own"