This is getting to be a sore point for me. The other day I read about a developer that had been abusing the review system with lots of false positive reviews for their apps. Some good guys caught out some idiots and then they had their developer licence revoked and all there apps removed. Yaa everyone is going... the bad guys got caught and Apple did the right thing. Well they had all 1000 apps removed from the store, which is 1% of the total number of apps.
1000 apps!!!!! So these guys have been spamming the store with apps and Apple has been letting them do it. There are lots of people that have been complaining about Apple rejecting apps and railing at the perceived inequity of it all. Sometimes Apple does seem to make a few boo boos but 100,000 apps in the store there are going to be mistakes.
What I am unhappy about is these spammers. They are adding hundreds if not thousands of apps to the store and most are of dubious quality. They idea seems to be that if you put enough apps in the store you can get a few unlucky people to buy your apps and you might be able to make a nice little earning milking the suckers. This is a business model, a pretty low and nasty business model but it seems to work for them.
I just had a look at the current apps and there is a series of obviously spam apps that have just been released ("Touch Scanner spam" and "All About spam")
Apple seem reluctant to do anything about it as there are a few problems with getting rid of them.
1. Apple will get more grief for "banning" more apps
2. Criteria (when is an app useless)
3. 100,000 apps sounds great. (but if like 50,000 are useless spam then that looks a bit hollow... 50k isn't a stretch if one developer had over 1k apps and I have seen other developers get banned with 1k+ apps)
But there are also lots of benefits to other developers if Apple get serious about getting rid of the spam.
1. Less apps = less noise in the store (you might get noticed)
2. Quality control. People are going to be more confident in getting apps if they better protected from spam.
3. Quicker review times. (they will stop submitting if they are getting rejected)
I have a mechanism that might help this process. But it might be a little controversial. People have to pay a deposit when submitting their apps. Yea say people have to pay 10 USD to submit an app and if you submit spam you loose it. If you submit a legit app then you get your money back. Alternatively you only get you deposit back if you make 10USD from the sales of you apps (so you get 10USD in sales you get 10USD deposit back). This works because the spammers don't make much per app (I think) an usually they only make money on one or two of their apps (which is why I call is spam). If they actually lost money on most of their apps then their business model takes a hit and becomes less viable.