I do not understand the point of this long rant when you have zero understanding of the mobile marketplace. I'm going to go ahead and take your advice and "say everything [you've] typed up until now is garbage" and "[wave] it all away" and respond to the reviews point.
When users grab an App for free, they leave worse reviews in aggregate, nearly every time. In the mobile marketplace, people who have to spend money to buy Apps normally have money, and often have jobs, which sometimes means they're adults, which occasionally means they act like adults when they decide to review an app they decide to spend money on. People who download apps for free often decide to act like privileged little brats and berate an app for any feature they perceive that it should have but which they fail to find (regardless of whether said feature exists in the app). They leave poor reviews and don't factor "value" into the equation because all they ever download are free Apps and they expect nothing less than Angry Birds every single time.
The other problem I've read (from another article about Amazon's Appstore, which I haven't been able to find) is that it does not support the compatibility portion of the manifest (i.e. incompatible devices are allowed to download apps). There is also no way to respond to negative reviews. The result is a lot of negative reviews by people who cannot run the app, and cannot be responded to.
When users grab an App for free, they leave worse reviews in aggregate, nearly every time. In the mobile marketplace, people who have to spend money to buy Apps normally have money, and often have jobs, which sometimes means they're adults, which occasionally means they act like adults when they decide to review an app they decide to spend money on. People who download apps for free often decide to act like privileged little brats and berate an app for any feature they perceive that it should have but which they fail to find (regardless of whether said feature exists in the app). They leave poor reviews and don't factor "value" into the equation because all they ever download are free Apps and they expect nothing less than Angry Birds every single time.