Hacker News Reader

Can confirm this experience

Well, unless you're talking about the Kindle Fire App Store- which is magnitudes worse than the App Store.

The Play Store (other than the horrific naming) strikes a decent balance, but isn't particularly great either.

Don't know why app stores seem to be so challenging for all the players in the space.

Probably because for apps there isn't a rich interconnected web of linked content to tell an algorithm what it needs to know in order to provide a good search experience. Google kinda got lucky in the sense that the discussion about the web happens on the web.

To stretch this a bit, I feel like "search" in general is a weak spot for Apple. For example, I think the search in Apple Mail and searching my Macbook are both very bad, especially the one for Apple Mail.