Some apps have questionable quality/relevance/longevity. With addons we have a fair idea what good looks like and where the line is drawn. With apps its pretty unclear right now (IMO at least). Questions that we need answers to: Does an app that just shows your ip address meet our standards? What if we had 100 of them? What about novelty apps that may amuse for 5 minutes on first use but won't be used again? If I make an app for my company that only we would find useful should we list that?

I'm going to comment all apps blocked by this with this bug # so the following should produce a current list of affected apps: https://marketplace.mozilla.org/en-US/reviewers/apps/logs?start=2012-05-01&end=&search=759156

My ₡2: > Does an app that just shows your ip address meet our standards? I'd say 'yes'. > What if we had 100 of them? That's generally a good problem to have. If they have a negative effect on browsing or discoverability, then that's when the policy should be reconsidered for those categories (like we do with video downloaders and dupe search engines). > What about novelty apps that may amuse for 5 minutes on first use but won't > be used again? They should be allowed, IMO. The add-on policies are designed to make as little value judgement as possible, and my guess is that app policies should be the same. I think you'd be surprise with the things that people think are useful or amusing. > If I make an app for my company that only we would find useful should we > list that? I think those sorts of app shouldn't be allowed, unless others outside the company can use them for something. I wonder if the Marketplace is going to be like getpersonas, though, where it will be for all practical purposes the only place to list apps that work in Firefox. If that's the case, I would support more lenient policies.

btw, we can discuss this next week - I was just logging it so I had a bug number to tag reviews with.

I really don't think it's a good problem to have, and we have good examples to that effect already. Sites like userscripts.net and the Android Market (or Play Store, or whatever they're calling it these days) are so full of useless apps and scripts that it's nearly impossible to find anything. If we're going to set the bar that low, then we need a way to distinguish between high quality apps and low quality apps, and ideally a very good search system, neither of which we have at the moment.

(In reply to Kris Maglione [:kmag] from comment #4) > If we're going to set the bar that low, then we need a way to distinguish > between high quality apps and low quality apps, That's what user ratings and usage stats are for. > and ideally a very good search system, neither of which we have at the moment. I beg to differ. While the search system isn't perfect, it does a good job keeping the least useful entries at the bottom of search results.

(In reply to Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] from comment #5) > (In reply to Kris Maglione [:kmag] from comment #4) > > If we're going to set the bar that low, then we need a way to distinguish > > between high quality apps and low quality apps, > > That's what user ratings and usage stats are for. While that's nice in theory, userscripts.org and the Android Market have both, and they don't help much at all. > > and ideally a very good search system, neither of which we have at the moment. > > I beg to differ. While the search system isn't perfect, it does a good job > keeping the least useful entries at the bottom of search results. Have you ever tried to find a search plugin? Every time I've tried even to find out whether there's a duplicate for a particular engine, I get pages and pages of nearly irrelevant results (most of which aren't search plugins), with some of the most relevant results pages on. I've had similar issues with other add-on searches.

(In reply to Kris Maglione [:kmag] from comment #6) > (In reply to Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] from comment #5) > > I beg to differ. While the search system isn't perfect, it does a good job > > keeping the least useful entries at the bottom of search results. > > Have you ever tried to find a search plugin? Every time I've tried even to > find out whether there's a duplicate for a particular engine, I get pages > and pages of nearly irrelevant results (most of which aren't search > plugins), with some of the most relevant results pages on. I've had similar > issues with other add-on searches. We're talking about apps not addons. While we have no idea how well the search results will cope with 1000's of apps, it doesn't suffer from all of the problems that AMO does (and its years of merges and quick rewrites). Apps are all a single type.

Once we start policing, we've started ourselves down a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line? What if I want an app that shows my IP -- does the first person to make it get in the app store and nobody else does? Do we allow **** apps or trivia apps, which have overrun the Apple Marketplace? Will people complain that we're playing favorites if we let one **** app in but not theirs? Rather, I think this is a technical problem we need to solve. We need to do our best to surface highly rated apps and downplay the thousands of Show My IP apps. We can't let reviewers decide if apps are "good enough"; that type of ambiguity will come back to haunt us.

I do think we need to draw up some minimum standard guidelines, at least at first. In the first few months after the launch (and up to it) having 'good' apps to demonstrate what you can do with apps will help us, and I fear a large number of fundamentally useless apps listed could harm the experience a new user would have. Over time ratings and downloads (we only get download numbers, not active users, afaik) should do it for us though right now there aren't any ratings and the downloads are low and probably skewed by testers. We've done it with add-ons since UMO became AMO (with the sandbox and then preliminary reviewed) so its not really impossible or unprecedented.

What is the status of this bug?

Is this done?

Review criteria are available here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Publishing/Marketplace_review_criteria