Microsoft could take the opposite approach and ruthlessly purge garbage apps so they could market a high quality app store. It's 2014. Most people know by now that a smartphone only needs a dozen 4 and 5 star apps to be useful.
It's ironic because initially that was their marketing message (even though it wasn't true at all). They said they have fewer, but higher quality apps. When in reality, they probably had a higher percentage of crappy apps to quality one than the other platforms. A lot of developers were releasing simple useless apps because they were getting paid to do it by Microsoft in the early days.
Seriously. My biggest issue with Android right now is finding apps that are actually good. App discovery in the play store is absolutely atrocious, and it's near-impossible to find good apps that aren't frequently downloaded (i.e. outside of the top 100 or so in the different categories) without wading through a sea of trash.
I've long since resorted to finding apps on my laptop before installing them on my phone. It's easier to find reviews outside of the crap reviews on the Play Store, check out the developers' websites, etc.
Plus, I have reasonable belief that if I click a Play Store link from Evernote's website, I'll be getting Evernote's actual app.
I can confirm that too being a ms partner and having partecipated at some of their university labs.
Their main goal is "We want you do some amount X of apps. It does not matter if they are all rss reader or just flashlight apps, you have to give us that amount X."
I was not happy to hear that and also tried to discuss about it saying that I would prefere to focus on 2-3 apps making them great against just maxing X crap apps because I have not enough time until the deadline, but they just told me that those are orders "from above" and to focus on some great app just AFTER I made the X amount.
Microsoft management must be very intelligent but they seem like utter morons - I want to replace all their keyboards, monitors and mice with 15 different broken ones and say "see lots of really crap ones is far better than one good one".
Seriously it's not hard to market quality over quantity successfully is it? All app users are frustrated by low quality apps it would really make me notice if MS had a properly curated app store and said "we have less apps in our store because we value you and your time; excellence is our goal and we want our app developers to strive for that too; better quality, better performance, better life" [that sounds suitably hyperbolic].
It can be hard to market quality vs sheer numbers. Hell, the rise of the "phablet" and the lack of high end smaller phones other than the iPhone sort of proves that. Although I agree with you, they should try exactly that.
I don't see that as an example. Many informed users like their "phablets" a lot - anecdote: I'm surrounded by 16 Android users vs 1 iPhone user, all of then have larger screens and like them, and discuss the merits of their phones.
I dislike "phablets" as phones myself, so I use a Nokia phone as a phone (much better phone quality and longer battery life) and have an Android phone as a tablet with 3G.
Also, there are lots of smaller versions of Android phones, the S4 mini might not be what you want but it sells really well over here.
'The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. '
Don't forget that MS also used pay anyone $100/app - regardless of quality. "Developers can net $2,000 in total by submitting up to 10 apps to each store."
I can confirm this, having interned at MSFT. There were a lot of deals where developers would get free devices if they published x apps. The only thing that mattered was the amount of apps, they didn't really look at the quality. Management had yearly goals that described how many new apps they needed in one year, but as far as I know, nothing was written about quality.
