App Stores are an effective model because people are willing to pay for a baseline level of filtering.  I can read anything I want online but I love buying certain magazines (New Yorker, Economist, Seed, etc) because I <i>know</i> the stuff in them will be good.  Sure, some good writing might not make it in because of the editorial process, but I'm willing to live with that.<p>I think the future of App Stores is to branch into departments with their own kind of branding.  The control and profit for store owners is too good to give up, but branded departments would give more variety.  IE the Role Playing Game Store, the Silly Diversion Store, etc.  This is technically simple to partition the stores like this, and it's would help solve the "big pile of apps" discovery problem.<p>Apple is more likely to let people/orgs create their own "app storefronts" and maybe give them 1% or 5% of the revenue.  So if you shop at pg's App Store, you would get things that are simple and useful, while if  you shopped at Scoble's App Store, you'd see every new tech gadget.