It's terrible and i can only imagine how much this hurts devs. Apple really doesn't care about the long tail.
The answer to questions like that is always money. Apple have a monopoly on selling apps on that run on Apple hardware. There is no measurable short-term benefit to them from making the user experience better. In fact they probably figure it'd hurt revenue.
As it stands the app store has about 20 slots that make serious money. Every app company wants in those slots and will do anything for it, eg give up 30% of their revenue and indulge various forms of payola.
Apple have created an artificial scarcity and it makes them something like 10 billion a year. And thanks to the monopoly enforced by crypto, there is no possibility of a competitor forcing them to change.
It's the perfect cash cow. Why screw up a good thing?
Large companies don't always do a good job of simple things, for all sorts of banal reasons related to specific people in management, organisational politics, etc.
Really these stores are setup for people who know exactly what they want before they even open the play store app. It's a shame and I'd love a more advanced filtering functionality, but instead all we get is a new sets of icons every couple of years.
1. It may not be that easy to evade the scrutiny of Apple's review team. It's hard to tell... of course, you only see it when they succeed. (Conversely, you won't see app developers post captivating and emotionally charged posts each time app submission works as expected, and no one would read them if they did.) There's a lot of selection bias going on here.
2. Legit app developers are usually focused on putting out their app while scammers are focused on finding cracks in the app submission process.
* I will note though that I do like the editorial type landing page they added to the store during the big "improvement"
This means that even if something outside the store mentions your app, you’d better hope they included a direct link to the store and not just the name.
You know, the first place I search for desktop software is on the apt repositories. Even when I'm looking software for Windows (then I repeat the names on Google to see if they run there).
Searching in aptitude is much better than on the web.
Right now, their “improved” App Store doesn’t even have what I would call a search engine. I can search for apps BY NAME and they still show up like #30 on the list below a whole pile of stuff that (I assume) only matches due to some weird random match of letters that happen to be in my search term. There is NO way to narrow the search category, NO filters (not even something so basic as “search only apps released in the last month”), etc. And every single iOS store issue is 1000x worse on the Mac store. They need to take that 30% cut and invest properly.
And search problems wouldn’t be so bad if their top-X lists made any sense. Top grossing, really? Great way to see the same 10 apps for like 3 weeks in a row. “Limited Time Prices”? At this very moment on the Mac store, ALL TWELVE “Limited Time Prices” apps are LEGO games! What good is that?