Even though they haven't publicly addressed the problem, I'm sure they knew that the current model was proving unsustainable well before any of us. You have to

Even though they haven't publicly addressed the problem, I'm sure they knew that the current model was proving unsustainable well before any of us. You have to imagine that for every 100,000 apps their small review team has accepted, they must have also rejected 100,000 more. Apple doesn't admit when things are shitty until after they've fixed the problem. They're smart like that. As far as solutions, I like the pay-per-app model the best. The signal-to-noise ratio in the app store is way too high (low?). It doesn't need to be too expensive to publish an app, it just needs to deter the kinds of publishers that are writing one app and rebranding it hundreds of times (per sports team, per state, etc). You even have people taking public domain novels and throwing thousands of them up as $0.99 ebooks, just on the chance that the sheer volume of them will make a profit. There are of course thousands of great apps, too, but the chances of stumbling across any of them are becoming smaller and smaller.