I don’t see this fixed anytime soon. I’m sure there are 10000+ entries in the app store. Note, entries. not unique/separate apps. And with the current setup its easy to get that. Yesterday somehow the game Mafia got into a search result and it was listed over 7 times on the first page alone. All different versions rating from a free one to paid ones starting at $.99 up to $14.99. That’s just ridiculous. And in my world doesn’t count as 7 apps. But one.

Apple might differ and call it a success because so many “apps” are available.

Quibbling about the number of applications is another.

So there are 30 checkers implementations? So what is the issue there then, other than more choice?

The situation is massively worse on Windows for example, and there is not even a central place to look there, you are limited to google and all the spam-crap that gets picked up in your searches.

They ALL have differences, and while the rules of the game are the same in all cases, that is true for every Chess application in existence as well, as well as the basic behavior in every Word processor if you want to go outside games, but that does not mean there are not USEFUL differentiations between every implementation.

I have two different paid Twitter applications on my iPhone. There is not ONE that does everything I want, and I would rather the choice than have to suffer with someone ELSE making the decisions as to which was “best for me”.

If Apple put arbitrary limits on how many of a given type of application can exist they will simply drive developers away.

The same goes for prioritizing application approval in anyway other than first-come first-served.

Counting Lite and Paid versions of the same application as discrete is rather less defensible, since the Lite stuff only exists because Apple does not presently allow a pay-to-upgrade/make a demo a full version model.

Maybe that’ll change with the OS 3.0 in-app purchase model.