Have you lately ended up downloading a paid app from the App Store only to find that it wasn’t quite worth the money?

This has actually happened to me too many times. For all of its path breaking potential, let’s face it: there’s plenty of junk out there in the App Store at present.

Which is all right, for now. It’s a new platform, and we’re still discovering what works and what doesn’t and the best ways of harnessing the iPhone power to create and run your apps are perhaps still evolving.

Nevertheless, or precisely because this is such a new platform, the App Store deployment, and the purchase procedures need to improve.

It is pretty tough to say an application is good just by looking at the icon of the Game and reading the short game description. The reviews aren’t helpful by themselves—most of the apps have at least a few positive, glowing reviews.

Also, visiting the website of the developers is also not very helpful. Most of the websites are too messed up. Another worry is that there are many strikingly similar applications with different price tags. Here too you can’t really predict the app that cost $9.99 will be better than the one sold for $4.99.

Considering all these, how wise can we be while choosing paid applications? The App Store is a new thing for all of us and we have these worries to deal with.

Downloading of applications should be as convenient as downloading movies and songs. Downloading songs from iTunes is never a problem because we can listen to the songs before downloading. Something like this must be there for applications.

What Apple really needs to do?

Apple probably knows about these inconveniences of App Store users. There are multiple ways to fix the issues. Here are few steps that Apple should seriously consider:

• Place a slideshow of the application in the game description page (Provided by the developers).

• Mandatory submission of related video/demo of the application at the time of submitting the app.

• The ability to “return” an app within, say, two hours of downloading it—and getting a full refund. And no, this will no lead to any kind of abuse where people just download an app, use it for a while and return it, only to download it again whenever they need it. The App Store maintains a precise history of all that you have downloaded—and this information is tracked by your iTunes account as well as by your device, so no one will be able to download and return an app more than once.

What do you want Apple to do to make sure that you get the best error free download from the App Store? Send in your views and opinions and let us know……