Is anyone honestly surprised by this? Google played into the telecoms' hands, they created the first viable competitor to the iPhone and gave it to the telecoms saying "do whatever you want with this, feel free to modify it any way you want".
Google's vision of a market in which handsets are independent from carriers is absolutely poisonous to the industry's business model. Even though the iPhone is very successful I don't think verizon or sprint are interested at all in a world where they are just a "dumb pipe", they won't allow it.
Google lost this war because of their commitment to openness.
I'm not quite understanding the "gave it to telecoms" part - The telecoms don't make phones. Companies like Motorola, Samsung, and HTC do.
And while Google "gave" it to them, they've all dumped incredible amounts of engineering hours into Android and their derivatives -- any illusion that they just ran a Ubuntu install on their Galaxy S and that was it is utterly asinine around parts like this.
Seriously, the "giving it away" bit is dumb, and while it sells on the non-technical sites, it is an embarrassment on HN.
I find your lack of courtesy to be the embarrassment to HN.
I was simply try to the make the point that by pushing an open source OS (as in manufacturers could alter the OS to include anything the carriers insisted) Google blindsided itself. They expected to create something that would change the handset/carrier/customer relationship, instead they just enabled the next generation of the same thing. The Nexus One is evidence of this.
These worthless apps are also a cost to Apple. It is getting harder and harder to find quality apps on the App Store. The Store itself is now (a) the 'Featured' page, (b) the 'Top Ten' lists, and (c) Apple's 'Collections'. The more difficult it is to find quality apps the more difficult it will be for the ecosystem as a whole to improve.
Are there other examples of online stores with vast selections which genuinely help users find quality products? Netflix is the only one I can think of. (And don't get me started on Apple's 'Genius Recommendations'.)
It is a cost to Apple, but it is a problem they are actively addressing in R&D. I'm basing this statement largely on discussion from yesterday's HN post (the guy claiming to be "snubbed" on potential Apple business deal): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440303
Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?
Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it.
The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query.
I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that someone else has written about that game.
OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult.
Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make a big difference).
To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't know what you're looking for.
