This. This is why how Steam operates is 10x better than the mobile app stores. A 30% fee for getting your app in front of the users who might buy it is one thing. Steam isn't perfect, but they've set up their economic model where they are rewarded for doing this, which is good for both developers and users. This involves personal recommendations, maybe third party curation features, search etc.

If you have an ad-based model, there's less of a reason improve those other systems, since the store might be able to extract 75% of the value created if you get developers bidding against each other to buy visibility. But it sucks for everyone except the app store owner.