It seems to me, after creating several apps of my own, that the App Store is meant to reward outliers, not make sure everyone gets in front of people.
We've released a few apps and found that the most successful were the ones which didn't fit any basic mold. At the same time, the more apps we make, the better we do.
andymoe's friend is the kind of story that Apple wants to have seen and they curate and control the medium to make it easier for people like that to succeed. I'm not saying they do the best job of it - crap copycat apps are in there too - but they have made a great medium for the persistent, innovative and determined developer to succeed.
Of course, when you make a medium that rewards persistence, unfortunately copycats can also succeed because they can be persisten too. Take the good with the bad.
I see what you mean and don't actually think it's a bad thing for it to be targeted at rewarding outliers - really good apps are probably by definition outliers.
But my concern about the poor search functionality is that it rewards the wrong outliers. E.g. people who are persistent and lucky/ early to the game rather than persistent and release great apps.
My very anecdotal example of this is the travel planner apps people use in London. Most people on ios I know use apps which are shockingly inaccurate with ux that leaves a lot to be desired.
They continue to use them because short of "download whatever has been downloaded a lot by other people" there's no reasonable way to find new higher quality ones.
We've released a few apps and found that the most successful were the ones which didn't fit any basic mold. At the same time, the more apps we make, the better we do.
andymoe's friend is the kind of story that Apple wants to have seen and they curate and control the medium to make it easier for people like that to succeed. I'm not saying they do the best job of it - crap copycat apps are in there too - but they have made a great medium for the persistent, innovative and determined developer to succeed.
Of course, when you make a medium that rewards persistence, unfortunately copycats can also succeed because they can be persisten too. Take the good with the bad.