Lisbon founders test a slower app store
A coalition of small software teams is experimenting with review windows, repair pledges, and clearer subscription terms.
2 min read
The pitch is deliberately unfashionable: fewer releases, longer review, and a catalogue that grows slowly enough for a person to read.
What “slower” means in practice
Submissions are reviewed on a fixed weekly cycle rather than continuously. Updates are batched. An app that ships a change every day is not welcome, and the store says so in its guidelines rather than discovering it later through enforcement.
The founders’ argument is that continuous release is a distribution strategy, not a quality one — that the pace exists to hold attention, and that a store optimised for discovery has been optimising for the wrong thing.
A catalogue nobody can read is a search problem pretending to be a shelf.
The economics that make it possible
A slow store cannot survive on volume, so it does not try. Developers pay a listing fee; users pay a subscription; the store takes no revenue share on sales.
That inverts the usual incentive. A percentage-based store earns more when an app extracts more from its users, which is why the biggest stores have spent a decade legislating against the behaviours their own economics encourage. A flat fee earns the same either way.
It also caps the store’s ceiling, which the founders accept and their investors have had to be talked into repeatedly.
Curation is the product, and the liability
Every listed app is reviewed by a person who uses it. That is the differentiator and the bottleneck: the catalogue currently grows by roughly a dozen apps a month, and the reviewer team is the whole of the operating cost.
It also makes the store responsible in a way an open catalogue is not. A curated shelf implies endorsement, and the first serious dispute — over an app that handled user data badly after listing — established that the store cannot claim to be a neutral pipe.
The response was a published delisting policy and a public log of delistings. It is the most consequential document the company has produced.
What to watch
Watch the review backlog, which is the first thing to break under growth. Watch whether the flat fee holds once a listed app becomes genuinely large. And watch the delisting log, because a curated store that never delists anything has stopped curating.
