Mobile app stores are shovelware galore. Admission standards are in the toilet and they're flooded with thousands upon thousands of reskinned garbage "games" that frequently rely on superficial similarities to smash hit games in order to confuse users so they buy them, or at least launch to view ads. Reskinning is a whole industry, with people capable of launching several "games" every single day.
When Apple had long and thoightful review practices we treated them as the business murderers. And yet here we are asking exactly for their long and painful review process to have a comeback.
What is your suggestion? I am all for the Play store way of working; cheap to get your software out there. But indeed that made it a complete mess like you say, so my thinking is that there needs to be a more advanced way of sorting and searching (this is Google right?) to a) not only favor the most popular games b) to let the crapware sink to the bottom. For now this tagging is probably a human process which is why it will never happen as it needs to be humans employed by google not just users; users are not very good at this. Most I know do not see the difference between the real game and the knockoff so they vote positive. I would think some nlp/ml could pick up likely knockoffs fast and penalize them; they need something in the name and graphics to make users recognize it. I would be against barriers of admission, more for better filtering and search. Not sure why the search is so bad... I search google.com and then click to the play store for the best results; that seems so backwards...
