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Yahoo got where it was by being the first directory on the web. It was terrible — to get listed you had to submit an application and then whether and how you we

• cableshaft 10y ago
  While I agree the App Store has it's fair share of issues, they do at least do more than 'here's the category an employee determined you should be, buried in subcategory after subcategory, and this is the only place people will ever find you' that the early Yahoo had. They have dynamic lists based on sales and downloads (which has its own issues, admittedly) for every category that may be algorithm-based but has no human making arbitrary decisions for each individual app. They also choose certain apps and feature them on the front page of the app store, which changes every week. They also let developers choose their categories (instead of employees choosing the categories), and developers can choose more than one category. They also let developers pick keywords (with some limitations) for users to find the apps via search terms. Each app page has its own url, so it can be landed on via other methods throughout the web. So all in all, it's very different from early Yahoo, and significantly better, and all of that would be plenty if they had like 1% of the total number of apps that they do, but they don't, so way too many apps get buried and unnoticed.