Apple Needs To Fix Its App Store Spam Problem (AAPL)
Even with Apple's ham-fisted control over the App Store, it's still filled with spammy applications, notes Marco Arment, the developer behind the popular “Instapaper” app. — Case in point: Marco wanted to download a popular game called “Angry Birds” (iTunes Link).
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after the myth of the 99-cent killer app framed the App Store's early gold-rush economics, developer Marco Arment — whose Instapaper is one of the platform's better-known indie successes — is calling out the flip side of that flood of cheap apps: a catalog so cluttered with spammy knockoffs that even buying a hit like Angry Birds becomes a hunt through lookalikes. His critique lands awkwardly for Apple precisely because the company sells tight curation as its differentiator.
The timing sharpens it: with iPad pre-orders opening May 10 in nine more countries and the device shipping there May 28, Apple is about to expose a much larger, international audience to the same storefront, and NPD's survey work shows most iPhone and iPod touch users already treat the store as their main entertainment pipeline.
First-order effects
- Legitimate developers like Arment lose discovery and sales to copycat apps that squat on popular names and keywords, while customers risk paying for junk masquerading as hits like Angry Birds.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces a direct trade-off between its review-team capacity and catalog hygiene just as the iPad launch multiplies storefront traffic — every complaint from a prominent developer raises the reputational cost of approval misses.
- Rival platforms courting iOS developers gain an argument: if the walled garden can't keep spam out despite rejecting competitors' apps, 'curated' stops being a selling point against more open stores.
Third-order effects
- If manual review cannot scale ahead of catalog growth, App Store quality control drifts toward reactive takedowns and algorithmic ranking fixes — a structural shift from gatekeeping at entry to policing at scale, with keyword-squatting and clone spam as the persistent failure mode.
The trend: As mobile app catalogs outgrow human review, storefront operators are being pushed from upfront gatekeeping toward scaled, reactive quality enforcement.