It’s my hope that under these conditions, apps that are genuinely growing will rise to the top, and those attempting to engineering their own virality will dissipate into irrelevance.
Unfortunately, when the current paradigm is to create and flip startups in the short-term, it's almost encourage to get rapid growth, long-term health be damned.
There are thousands of new apps on the market on a daily basis, all of them overlapping with each other and apps that are already on the market to a greater or lesser degree. Who is going to reduce that flood to the "best" of a particular category, worthy of your time and money, and on a regular and timely basis?
Granted, current app stores could be better, but you'd still have the discoverability problem simply due to the volume of apps now on the market.
Gaming is a tricky example, with gaming being a hit driven business: hits only last in the short term.
I don't believe Zynga was mislead by a viral product in Draw Something. They saw a fascinatingly simple game built by a great team, and I hope that's what they intended on purchasing, instead of yesterday's hit.
Unfortunately, when the current paradigm is to create and flip startups in the short-term, it's almost encourage to get rapid growth, long-term health be damned.