News - Canalys says operators can compete on app stores by offering less

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A rather counter-intuitive view as app revenue set to continue rapid growth.

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Sounds pretty sensible to me. I have trying to find anything in the Android Market - too much rubbish on there cluttering out the good apps. I'd happily trade some of that choice for knowing I was getting a decent quality app - particularly if I always had the option of going back to Market if i couldn't find anything suitable on the 3rd party store. A 3rd party store with good QA procedures on accepted apps would be very useful...

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While consumers would probably object to operators installing their app stores in place of vendor ones, there is no reason for operators not to pre-install their app stores alongside vendor stores to compete on user experience.

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I'd say (for the Google Market Place) that the quote above is a pretty fair assessment. What surprised me when I got my first 'droid phone was how incredibly poor GMP was - especially given Google's undoubted expertise in search. Okay, it's got better, but talking to folks I'm not alone in preferring to "push" apps from the desktop version of GMP. So if Voda, O2, EEE, Three, etc wanted to do a dedicated app that gave a "better" view - even if it was something as basic as limiting you to only highly rated apps - then I'd welcome it.
If I had my choice, I'd offer more control, e.g. being able to use tags on app descriptions so, for example, if you didn't want themes and sound packs to be included then you could deselect those.

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While they must clearly be careful to respect their customers' privacy, the data they hold leaves them well positioned to propose targeted marketing services, such as promotions and recommendations, as well as richer editorial guidance, better localization, improved security and simpler billing processes

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How is "simpler billing" a 'marketing service' - personally I would have thought every customer would be interested in, and entitled to, this?
Apart from the billing part, (and possibly recommendations), the rest of the quote gives me a distinct sinking feeling, especially "editorial guidance" (= "censorship").

I must admit, I'm against anything which adds more bloatware to phones. Hell, it'd be OK if you could even uninstall the things, but things that get preinstalled don't often seem to be uninstallable. So the choices are: leave it on, or install a custom ROM. And not everyone has the latter option.