Letting anyone sell anything they want is how you get the Play Store, a monument to bad experiences. Pages upon pages of cloneware apps, asset-flip games, on and on and on, all of which of course are drowned in advertisements. In my last year of owning an Android before I got my first iPhone, the 6 Plus, I didn't even open the Play Store anymore. It was awful.

That's not to say everything on the App Store is great, of course, but it's a hell of a lot better.

Edit: Upon further thought I should really go further with this: The quality of the App Store is part of the marketing of iDevices. This is why Apple's app review process also looks for things like apps that crash too much, apps that run slowly, apps that are burning through system resources, on and on. It's why you generally won't have an app on their store that will, for example, destroy your battery, or games that show you ads every 15 seconds.

I know the attitude on HN generally prefers freedom over curation, and in many ways I'd agree, but when it comes to the walled garden Apple provides, sorry friends, I just like being here.

Edit's edit: In fact, I can even take this one step further: this is, I believe, part of the reason iOS users are far more likely to be willing to PAY for their apps: because Apple checks them at the door. And sure, quality isn't guaranteed per say, but at least you know someone is trying at it. You can be assured that this app isn't going to damage your device somehow, and you can be reasonably sure that it's going to do what it says on the tin, at least competently. And if not, Apple has your back with refunds, too.

The apps in app store is as bad as play store. There are clones as well. A competition to app store would cause serious revenue fall for apple thats why they want to control.

Apple can do what they want with their store, everyone agrees.

But does everyone agree with Apple's decisions on what is bad UX?

I cant think of a tenet I disagree with.

Do you think a purely subjective rule is the right way to determine if software should be allowed to be sold or not?

Look around on the Google Play store and you'll see that no, the market does not filter out crap. Crap is most of what you can find on Google's store. Just try to find a proper mail client or file manager, there is so much junk in there.

What on earth are you talking about? We were comparing quality of apps in the App Store versus Google play store, that was the whole premise of the discussion. How does that make me an addict?

I also didn’t say there weren’t any proper apps in the google play store. I said there is lots of crap in there. I also didn’t say that stock apps of all vendors are crap. Obviously file management and email were examples. You can apply my statement about general quality of android apps to practically any app category. There are so many half baked, proof of concept, abandoned hobby project, malicious data hoarding apps on the google store that you waste lots of time looking for something that can do something that should have been solved already. It is hard to filter through the crap.

This is not a useful response. If you're going to make an assertion, don't run behind false pretences and logical fallacies to defend yourself from a cogent argument.

Your phone didn't come with carrier-bundled bloatware?

One app form vodafone which is for account management purposes. That is all.

"There isn't a single app on my phone that's junk. "

I use that app to pay my bill and enabled roaming charges when I travel. It has two very clear use cases.

Being a consumer, you would be part of helping the market filter these out. I don’t want to help my grocer “filter out” spoiled foods too often. I’ll go to a grocer that filters a bit before stocking.

Who is the arbiter of bad UX? Everyone can agree on rotten fruit, what is a rotten user interface?

Everything I've learned about UX is that a spreadsheet will solve tons of problems that it's the worst interface for. Yet that is what people often want.