Comment Race to the bottom (Score 1) 258
The big issue is that there is a "race to the bottom" in apps. There's always someone with deep pockets who can create an app that does what yours does, a little worse, and a little cheaper or for free, and because you've got a market with low discoverability, it's the cheapest app that wins. You only have to look at the startling decline in iPhone gaming over the past few years; after a lot of promising experiments in new titles around 2010-2012, games over $1 now almost exclusively ports of successful titles from other platforms to minimise development costs. The vast majority of iPhone gaming lies under that line, and is dominated by F2P and a few 99-cent apps that win the popularity lottery.
Apple seems to be actively cultivating that price-driven market, in particular through its ruthless promotion of F2P games as its "free app of the week". It's in Apple's favour because they make money selling hardware, and an iPhone is more attractive if it has lots of apps that do whatever the customer needs for free or next to free. Heck, they've all but killed off several app niches themselves by giving away iWork and iLife. It's not something that can go on indefinitely unless they plan on being the only quality iPhone app developer though.
If they want to solve this problem, they have to put discoverability of apps back to the fore, so people bother to find good things and not just the first cheap or free option.