Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists

Perhaps not Mountain Lion per se, but by your own description it effectively turns the top 10 into a top 9, and for no reason. Now, when that is expanded to the point where the practical reality is that non-apple apps are basically competing for two slots in the top 10, then yes, you start to feel like maybe not that much software is being sold on the Mac App Store. When a spreadsheet program that hasn't seen a major revision in 4 years still chops the charts, yes, it feels like its probably not worth it.

More importantly, as a user, I've simply become blind to the top 10 charts on the Mac App Store completely. I have no desire to visually scan for the 2 apps that might be different.

No, I'm pretty sure that when people say they dislike the "Top" lists, what they're really saying is pretty much what Marco wrote here.

Editors' picks are always a wild card because you don't know on what basis the picks are happening. But your assertion that they're always about the "connections" you have strikes me as, well, very anecdotal. I have some experience on both the submitting and receiving side of magazines, and generally speaking what gets your story accepted is the quality of your story. People often assume you need "connections" to get into big name markets, but big name markets attract big name authors and that makes the barrier of entry much higher. I have no inside knowledge of Steam, but I suspect that's very likely what goes on there: the more developers want to be on Steam, the harder it will be to be on it.

Of course, Apple already has editors' pick lists which I've heard really do boost app sales significantly; the question is really whether dropping Top 10 lists would flatten the curve further; I suspect the sales would remain vastly overweighted toward the featured apps no matter what, but perhaps if the featured apps were rotated frequently that would help. I rather like one of the other commenters' ideas of keeping the top 10 lists, but just removing apps you've already purchased from them.

The App Store search is pretty bad, as other people have commented. (A lot of people think the changes to the store in iOS 6 made it worse, but it's not like it was good to start with.)

I am most annoyed by the Google Play store being unable to seperate games and apps correctly. The app section is littered with games making it difficult to browse apps without being crushed by them. The games have their own section. They should stay in it to prevent this clutter.

At the end of the day, Apple's goal isn't to get rich off the App Store. It's to do what they can with the App Store to continue driving sales of iPhones and iPads. At the moment, what they believe is that by promoting apps (via these lists) that promote and show off the iPhone/iPads in the best light is the way to do it.

Arguing why Apple should incentivize higher priced software is a common but mistaken refrain amongst developers.

Apps are complements to the iPhone and iPad. Spolsky has a great post about the competition between complements here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Basically, the less apps cost, the more iPhones Apple will sell. It makes the entire ecosystem more attractive to consumers because they know there's 100's of thousands of apps they can buy for Imagine how much less your mom would want an iPhone if she scrolls through the App Store and finds mostly stuff that's $20 or $30. The platform becomes too expensive for casual users, who are 95%+ of iOS customers.