The Store is being decimated by a handful of developers spamming low-effort apps

App spammers like those are exactly why I've stopped looking at the app store. Just looking around to see what might be new and useful is drowned out by those low effort apps, etc... Terrible.

Wow. Just wow.

Have you, yourself, tried using the Store?

Like really use it - just browse available faces by category and actually finding something that is NOT from one of these "prolific developers casting a wide net"?

What people on that sub are suggesting - an option of hiding content from select developers - is a very sensible request. Does Garmin you have any plans to support that?

Coincidentally, I was just browsing a Reddit thread about this very topic earlier today. With respect, this is not a bug report but a discussion topic. I'll respond here to at least provide some defense for Garmin's position.

We treat our store as a hosting solution rather than a curated storefront. YouTube is the best analogy I can think of—there's a whole lot of trash videos out there, but presumably as long as you don't violate YouTube's terms of service, they allow them and rely on their algorithms to serve up content to users. We operate in a similar manner.

None of the developers listed above have violated any of our terms. They are just prolific and use a strategy of creating many, very similar watch faces to cast a wide net. I doubt anyone would want Garmin to start making qualitative determinations of each app's value, so we approve any app that follows the rules (see https://www.garmin.com/en-US/legal/terms-of-use/).

Our intent is to allow customer activity to drive content on the store. Apps that have no or few downloads and/or no or low ratings would fade, while more popular and highly-rated apps would remain prominent. I believe the best we can do is make improvements to our store algorithms to make the experience better. Of course, if any of these developers is violating terms of service in some way, anyone can report them and that can be dealt with.

Regarding the topic of moderation, and legal considerations aside (which are many), by what criteria should we determine an app to be spam? Is someone that makes a lot of watch faces a spammer? What about someone that is learning and creates some objectively poor watch faces but offers them earnestly? Are watch faces that are too similar in design spam? Hopefully you can see the challenges we'd face if we engaged in some kind of moderation beyond terms violations.

No need to be hostile and disrespectful toward Garmin folks.

In the end I doubt this mess is intentional. Most likely it's either due to store moderation not being a priority or due to a lack of resources. Maybe both.

The point of the post was to try and entice Garmin to prioritize this issue and to curtail at least some of most blatant abuse.

It has no use to try to convince Garmin that there is an issue with spammers in the store. May we should spam them with a few hundred or thousand bug reports about this every day, every hour, every minute,.... and even then I think they will not do anything about it. Garmin sucks at this