I fell into the same trap, I thought it was a curated list given it's so prominent but... No, it's just a dumb list sorting by some counter (or score based on download count, reviews, etc.).
I'm in the same camp as many other commenters on this thread, some years ago (7-10) I used to use the App Store to actually discover apps, nowadays I just open it to search for exactly the app I'm looking for, mentally skip the 1st result as it's always an ad and then look around for what I actually searched for.
Terrible experience, the storefront aspect is completely useless now. Haven't bought any app that I discovered myself, it's usually through recommendations from friends or internet reviews.
Tim Cook is an extremely good bean-counter and logistics guy but definitely shouldn't be at the helm of being the judge for product development anymore. In that sense Jobs was actually pretty unique and had good taste.
They do curate. The home view of the app store is all curated. They have a full team dedicated to that view and getting selected can get you significant installs. Also all the editor's choice apps are curated.
Hardly. Calling a list 'curated' doesn't make it so. Technically an intern could look at a sort and call it curated. On both app stores the editor's choices and top downloads are all bullshit and/or gamed.
Apps drop their inflated prices for a huge perceived discount to drive downmoads and get to the top of the list.
Editor's choices are supposed to be curated by some anonymous eponymous editor but the apps are just always already popular apps, so another sort by downloads.
I'd not put it past these companies to say they their 'AI'(hate they all use this term) is curating the lists for us, so technically sort by downloads is their curation.
Google play store is worse- the sales tab is always the same scam games, top paid makes no sense, editor's choice is bullshit.
In my area some crappy banking apps made it to the top list for the same reason: often downloaded.