Reminds me of the Golden Age of home arcade gaming.

Atari box art told a story the cartridge just couldn't deliver.

The author is wrong that Google and Microsoft don't do this level of illustration - they do and have for a while. They just do it on their home search screens, not on their App Stores

Google Play usually has a new custom illustration for every promotion. The current one is Big in Japan.

https://play.google.com/store/apps

Do you have some examples? I have not encountered either. I'm familiar with bing showcasing interesting photos, which is fun, but not at all comparable to an editorial team commissioning graphical illustration for their content.

Believe the parent is referring to the iconic and world famous Google Doodles.

The Android weather widget has an illustrated frog.

When graphic design looks the same everywhere, illustration becomes a differentiating factor. Great to see illustration taking this direction again.

Just to provide credit; I believe the sole photo in that entire set was taken by Cole Wilson. Not %100 sure, but it wreaks of his style and composition.

https://www.instagram.com/colewilson

The editorial additions are just lipstick on a pig. The most important feature (decent search functionality) continues to be absent.

Apart from including publisher results in a way that doesn't differentiate those results from apps themselves (a different icon would really help), I really can't say I have any complaints with search. That said, I tend to know the name of the app I want, rather than searching for apps with certain features, so in most cases I'm doing a very basic string match search.

I expect that Apple's approach to curation and discovery helps somewhat lessen the need for better search.