There's an interesting point about the kind of people who leave comments on sites and services like the Apple Apps store, YouTube videos and so on; firstly, you're more likely to leave a complaint than praise (or as Pete Blackshaw says, "a happy customer tells 3 people, an unhappy customer tells 3,000.") The way Apple's apps store works means that your first point of reference about the quality of an application is the user reviews, and the way it encourages you to rate applications when you delete them actually magnifies this effect.

Secondly, it's far, far easier to leave a comment with a complaint than to do the leg work and find out if your problem has already been solved.

I think the centralised apps store is one of the things that really makes the iPhone stand out as a mobile platform (which is in itself an opportunity handed to them by the mobile industry for failing to establish working standards for the mobile web over the last decade), but that's not to say it's perfect.

From a developer perspective, it's far from it- from the process of actually getting an application on there, to the process of getting it in front of an interested customer, to actually getting them to consider making a payment— each step has a number of not insignificant problems.

Anyway, this story is worth a read…