iTunes store drives me nuts, but what's the alternative?

The iTunes store has some good features, but also some terrible ones that drive people nuts. For example, run iTunes on the Mac or PC and go to the App Store to look for some apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch. If you browse the apps, such as each category, the top free or paid, and so on, you'll find that there are no ratings. If thousands of people have given an app a 1-star rating then I don't want it. It's a dud. But you can't tell from the iTunes store unless you click on an app, wait for the page to load, then scroll down it to the ratings near the bottom. Clicking back and forth and scrolling trying to find an app with a half decent rating drives me nuts. Browsing on the iPhone/iPod Touch is actually slightly better because ratings are shown in in the app listings, so why are they not there in iTunes on the computer? That's not the only problem.

Browse through the top free apps and you'll find some that have terrible ratings, so how come they are in the top apps lists? Today Zombie Duck Hunt is the number 2 top free app. It got five stars from 107 people and one star from 539 people. If we say that three stars is an average rating then 136 people think it's above average and 671 think it's below average. So how is it number 2 in the top free app list? That's with the sort set to best-sellers. It's not sold, it's free, so does it mean most downloaded apps and not the best selling? That would make more sense because people might download it thinking that it's free, so I'll try it and even if it's rubbish it hasn't cost me anything. I personally don't download anything that has five times more people rating it a one star than five stars.

Go to the Top Grossing Apps list and down at number 20 is MyCarCheck (I'm using the UK iTunes store - your's might be different). MyCarCheck is free, so how is it on the top grossing list? Zombie Farm is down at 66 on the top grossing list too and it's another free app. So is Tap Fish at 69, Godfinger at 78 and others. Surely top grossing apps are the ones that are making the most money?

There are 200,000 apps in the app store, or so Apple tells us, but how many have you seen? You've probably browsed the top free and paid in each category, which is about 100 apps in 20 categories, so that's about 2,000 apps. This means there are 198,000 you haven't seen. That's a huge number, so where are they? How can you access them?

iTunes is a poor way to find apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but we're stuck with it. Apple really needs to improve the app store navigation and provide more and better ways to browse apps. I'm sick of seeing the same old apps in the top whatever lists and there are 198,000 somewhere that I can't find. Apps stay at the top because people can't find any others and they end up downloading what everyone else is downloading. This keeps the same apps on the top lists and is self perpetuating.

Sorting by downloads, rating, name, release date would help, but also historic data like the top downloads for each month would be good. New and recently updated lists would also be useful, as would editor's ratings.