
A distant echo of Symbian app development
There the problem people had was generally with the security and installer systems rather than app store curation but the overall picture feels familiar: you write the app but can't get it deployed and the feedback is too cryptic to usefully move you towards success.
In the Symbian case it was so bad that a popular website was www.whythefuckwontmysisfileinstall.com which analysed an uploaded app to report what of the many possible misconfigurations were leading to a bland "Installation failed" message. This sort of misery coupled with the need to pay for code signing certificates and a idiosyncratic toolset (or more truthfully: a shitty toolset) surely helped to choke the flow of good apps. The one thing we grunts knew was that Balmer's "developers! developers! developers!" was actually true, and we persistently failed to provide an environment to lure them in
So it's ironic to see Symbian's final resting place (Nokia) depending upon the success of another "ecosystem" that seems to have forgotten to smooth the developers' pathway.