This isn't meant to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious what the best ways are to discover Android apps.
So you need a gatekeeper. But not just one -- you need a number of them.
In the physical book world these are publishers. There are many good and bad effects to publishers, but one of the good effects is that they screen out huge amounts of crap before it's ever inflicted on the public.
I don't buy e-books by using the Kindle store. I go through physical book listing only, presuming that if it's made it past a publisher, it might be worth my time to look at. After I find something interesting, I'll flip over to the digital version if that's what I'm interested in.
To solve the app store problem there needs to be more than one store. There needs to be a lot of stores. These can be _within_ Google's or Apple's store.
Professional publishers can partner with selected application vendors, roughly "endorsing" apps. Publishers can join together to form groups, and groups can create storefronts.
As a buyer I can then pick and choose from storefronts/publishing groups that organize and choose books that are appropriate for me.
App sellers will have to give up some of their (non-existent, because nobody knows the app is there) revenue to the publishers in exchange for the service.
As long as the buyer and can shift and select from between publishing groups, and the base provider (like Google) makes it _tough_ to become a publisher or group, it stands a chance.
Imagine logging on to Steam, and finding a million games, 99.9% of which are crap. And then buried somewhere, in all of that crap, are a few underfunded gems, whose authors are desperately trying to make it work. And then they get cloned.
It's transformed my cooking as now I no longer burn my pizzas.
I half kid. It is beautiful, and I would love to find other incredibly functional, well-thought out, complete and gorgeous apps.
As to the comment above about it being quality over quantity... no, it's both, quality and quantity. The long tail should be served, but I want the quality to exist at the tallest part of that histogram.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ilumbo.ovo...
For anyone curious, here is a recent app roundup they did. http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/10/04/51-best-and-2-wtf-ne...
I love it whenever the have the cheap $0.10 or $0.25 sales, not just because the apps are cheap, but also because they present a dozen or so apps a lot of which I've never seen before...
I'm using http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine .
Appstore discovery is currently very much the directory that altavista and yahoo used to be, but good old Google works just fine.
I like to G+ recommends by people in my circles.
I have not found any very good method though.