It's ok to make stupid apps as long as you're not scamming.
The oh-so-serious nature of the current online experience sucks
Oh I remember those two. I think they were installed via Cydia[1] no? Or maybe it was right after, when the official AppStore was launched. Silly, but great wow factor in those early days.
[1] for the youngsters here: Cydia was the only way to install apps in your iPhone before the AppStore was created (circa 2008). You had to jailbreak your phone, install Cydia, and then we had a handful of apps that demonstrated iPhone's capabilities.
I remember my first app was some marble labyrinth game, that served as a fantastic demonstration of iPhone's accelerometers. Pretty surreal at the time.
Saurik, Cydia's main developer, is frequently seen around on HN threads.
https://osxdaily.com/2006/12/06/macsaber-turn-your-mac-into-...
I read somewhere that for the past decade this app concept won't work on Macbooks because with the SSDs they no longer have the sudden motion sensor which was used to shut down the hard drive to protect it in case of an accidental drop.
In my ideal world, Apple wouldn't have a walled-garden at all. But if they will, then there needs to be a certain bar for apps to meet to be included. And to be clear, there are plenty of existing apps that don't meet such a bar. But Tip 69 definitely doesn't.
Actually, there's an interesting notion that could exist on both the official App Store, or in a hypothetical non-Apple one: cull apps that have too low usage activity. But give them a fair shake by attracting attention to them, then seeing what users make of them. And when you do remove low-to-nil use apps, don't remove their listings, keep them as archived entries that users can try to vote back to life.
Obviously, a lot of these mechanisms would be exploited by bots and the like, because the internet just can't have fun experimental interactivity anymore. Doesn't scale.