1. Online crowdsourced ratings can't be trusted anywhere. Not in the App Store, not on Amazon, etc. They're just too easy to game. The role of reviewing product

1. Online crowdsourced ratings can't be trusted anywhere. Not in the App Store, not on Amazon, etc. They're just too easy to game. The role of reviewing products was always best done by the professional news media. 2. The App Store was based entirely on the iTunes Music Store, and that's an extremely bad model for selling software. There are "bad" songs in the iTunes Music Store, but that's largely a matter of personal musical taste, and none of the songs are scams, because iTunes is not an open system where anyone can pay $99 for a "music developer" account and submit songs. The music for sale there was all written by legitimate professional musicians. Moreover, music customers generally don't need technical support, or refunds, except maybe in the case of a mistaken purchase. The ratings and reviews for songs are mainly about taste, not evaluating whether the song "works correctly". And songs are generally quite cheap, so you're not going to lose much money buying a "bad" song. This entire model is simply not appropriate for software. If an app doesn't work right, the customer needs technical support, and if it still doesn't work right, then the customer needs a refund. There should be exactly 0 apps in the App Store that are scams or don't work at all. Ratings and reviews are not a good way to "police" this. Every song in the iTunes Music Store "works", in the respect that it plays the expected music when you press play. The iTunes Music Store doesn't need to be curated much by Apple, because the music is already "curated" by the record labels. Same with the TV shows and movies for sale there, "curated" by the Hollywood studios. But there's no such thing for apps, and that's why the crap store is full of scams. The record labels and movie studios have large amounts of time and money invested in each of their products. This is not true of Apple's App Store, where each app gets maybe a 20 minute review, which is almost nothing in comparison.