The Connect IQ Store is getting worse by the day by a few developers who dump a shitload of *** watch faces

Sorry to know it! I am not Garmin official guy, so can't help with it. As a Garmin developer I can state the similar feeling. Quick and dirty apps are bloating App Store its true.
I believe Garmin staff can't do so much with it. Strict rules to check originality? Hmmm it can be very subjective. Probably they can rotate old app among new to increase visibility. 

When you look at the main page of the web based app store, you see the first few apps in a category, and when you click "more" you see at most about 4 more pages worth, while there could be hundreds in that category you won't see, even for non-watch faces.  The rankings and where things show are based on things like unique downloads, reviews, and maybe a few things that Garmin doesn't state.  Look at some of the things that do show on the main page - Things with 100's of thousands or millions of downloads and good reviews.  That's how those apps got there.

"Hot & Fresh" is for apps that are less than 4 months old, so new stuff can show there.  "Most Popular" is usually Garmin Apps or things like Spotify

Everyone wants their apps to be very visible in the store, but even for things other than watch faces, understand there can be a whole bunch of apps that want the same thing

Another thing to consider is how you name apps.  You want the name to include what a user may use as a search term for your app.  With both the web interface and the mobile app. once you search for a term, you can have it only show apps of a certain type - So a user could search and then only see data fields with that term for example

But at the same time, before picking a name, search to see if another app is already using that name. Multiple apps with identical names leads to confusion.

The apps that are already in the Store for years have 100 thousands or more downloads and reviews and will keep getting more because they are always visible through all the categories so people will keep downloading them.

You are wrong about the Hot & Fresh category because maybe a few are 4 months old but the rest is just a few days old.

New good apps will never get a lot of reviews and never make it because after a few days they are buried under all the *** that is being spammed by a few developers who just want some quick cash  and don't care about quality. 

I thought that Garmin stood for quality and innovation but how wrong could I be.....

I would like to hear a statement from Garmin itself and how they are going to fix the Store because right now its a big spam dump.

The store itself really hasn't changed in some time.

If a dev uploads 20 watch faces, who's to say if they are spam or not?  You may think it's spam, but that doesn't make it so.

The thing I would like to see is the ability to hide apps that require payment,

jim_m_58 said:

The store itself really hasn't changed in some time.

Yeah, that's the crux of the problem. The store itself hasn't changed in response to people who obviously game the system. It's like how google search results kinda suck now due to all the SEOs who gamed the system. But at least google has tried to improve its results over the years.

jim_m_58 said:

If a dev uploads 20 watch faces, who's to say if they are spam or not?  You may think it's spam, but that doesn't make it so.

"I know it when I see it."

jim_m_58 said:

The thing I would like to see is the ability to hide apps that require payment,

Ironically, all the devs mentioned in the OP publish nothing but watch faces which require payment. If you had your wish, you wouldn't see any of these apps.

jim_m_58 said:

who's to say if they are spam or not?

Let's look at the evidence:

Porthos: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/developer/4e662655-924d-4030-8fbc-fe292ad59072/apps

- 196 watch faces, all with similar design, just different backgrounds and layouts
- payment required for all of them
- Only ~17 apps even have reviews

Simon433: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/developer/eb17537a-1f42-456a-9c26-099e7ecc12ca/apps

- 136 watch faces, all with similar design, just different backgrounds and layouts
- payment required for all of them
- 0 reviews
- 52 out of 136 apps are new. Totally normal to upload 52 apps within a very short period of time, especially when you have 84 existing apps that nobody is downloading

SpecialFaces: apps.garmin.com/.../apps

- 206 watch faces, all with similar design, just different backgrounds and layouts
- payment required for all of them
- 1 app with reviews

If you click on some of these watch faces, the download numbers are in single or double digits. That's low even for Connect IQ.

This is basically the equivalent of releasing 100s of nearly identical Face-It watch faces to the store, each with a different background. (inb4 you can't put Face-It watch faces on the store -- the point is if you could, this is what it would look like.)

Obviously these devs (or single dev with different names?) are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick.

What a normal dev would do is release a handful of watch faces with a given design/concept, and see if people like them. If people start to download and review their apps, maybe they will iterate on those apps to improve them over time.

What a spammer does is release hundreds of cheap clones of the same watch face that nobody wants.

I don't care *that* much about CIQ these days, but I can see how this is a bad situation for both users and devs. If in fact these spam watch faces dominate the results when users casually browse the store (along with a few popular established watch faces), it does seem like it would be hard for new watch faces to attract attention. This discourages both devs and users from even bothering with CIQ.

Nobody I know even cares about CIQ anyway, and I'm sure this type of problem isn't going to change that.

As far as realistic solutions go, Amazon had a kind of similar problem with people spamming tons of new AI-generated books, so they set a limit to how many books an author can upload per day.

Garmin could:

- set a hard limit on the number of new apps by a dev for a given period of time

- if the previous idea is too onerous, they could just limit the number of new apps from the same dev that appear under the Hot & Fresh category (or any given category). If they want to be "fair" to the dev, they could rotate a set number of new apps from the same dev. e.g. If I upload 50 apps to the store at once, maybe I only get to see 5 of those apps at any given time in the Hot & Fresh category (or any other category). The same idea could also apply to existing apps, maybe unless those apps happen to genuinely popular (in terms of downloads and/or reviews)

Consider the absurd scenario where a dev could use AI (or some kind of simple automation) to create and upload 1000s of apps to the store per day. I think everyone would agree this would be a bad thing.

What we're looking at here is more of a grey area, where you can't automatically say "50 apps at once is bad", but it should raise some red flags.

FlowState said:

Consider the absurd scenario where a dev could use AI (or some kind of simple automation) to create and upload 1000s of apps to the store per day. I think everyone would agree this would be a bad thing.

This is almost what I suspect is happening. It would not be too hard for someone with a basic level of scripting experience (be it Perl or Python or Ruby or something similar) to create a CLI that reads in the parameters (for background image, placement of various complications, supported devices, etc), generates the source code (from templates) and compiles the whole thing to an .IQ file for uploading as a new project.

Unfortunately, watch faces lend themselves to this kind of abuse, in a way that none of the other app types do. This is part of the reason I no longer offer any new watch faces, and barely give any attention to updating the ones I have done in the past. The other big issue with programming watch faces is that every user has a different thought on what data/complications should be shown and/or they expect a level of customization on par with the Garmin built-in interface. And they aren't afraid to tell you as such in reviews or in the developer contact form.

So while I am disappointed to see this kind of activity on the Garmin Connect IQ Store, I'm nowhere near as frustrated as others because I left the watch face world three or four years ago. But we don't need this kind of poor quality, similar looking, app bombardment. What we really want/need is a larger developer community, with those developers producing good quality apps but each doing so in a lower quantity.

The interesting thing in all of this is that, in general, there is a direct correlation between poor, spam-like upload behaviour (and rating manipulation) and a lack of activity here in the developer community. And the reverse is also true, in that developers with a lower app count and/or who try to produce good apps, tend to be active, helpful members here in the forum and good community members with code sharing, etc.