I visit the
iPhone App Store fairly often. Excluding games, most of the Apps that I look at are either dull or buggy -- and even good 3rd party apps are slow compared to Apple's apps. Even some of the apps I used to use, like Byline.app, have become unacceptably buggy. Others are clones of applications I'm currently satisfied with.
Why is this?
I'd like to know. I'll hazard some guesses.
My first guess is that the current iPhone APIs are buggy. Apple's own iPhone apps are pretty responsive and reliable, but, obviously, Apple developers have insider knowledge. Perhaps Apple can use less buggy private APIs, or knows what to avoid.
My second guess is that it's very hard to write an innovative iPhone App. You can't use Location, because there's no background API for that [Corrected thanks to a comment]. You can't mess with the Calendar, because there's no API for that. You can't do anything resembling an Apple product because your App will be rejected. Maybe the dev environment is so challenging that, in addition to the above, you have to be a real hot developer.
A contributing factor is that the non-game developer market is oddly small. For competitive reasons Adobe and Microsoft don't do iPhone development. Apple itself doesn't sell iPhone apps. Google would like to play, but Apple's effectively banned them.
If you add up all of the above, there are very few people have both the capability and the motivation to do non-game iPhone development.
So the (non-game) App store is boring and buggy.