It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single handset maker or mobile operator in possession of a great deal of customers, must be in want of an App Store. Is what Jane Austen would have written if she was a 21st century mobile games journalist.

Yes, Apple has taken pride in its iPhone App Store, and engendered prejudice among owners of other handsets towards the old portal way of selling games. And for that reason, pretty much every handset maker and operator has launched, announced plans to launch, or started work on its own App Store equivalent.

There's no doubt that Apple's version has been a big step on from the established way of doing things, but there's always room for improvement. With that in mind, here's a consumer's eye view of the ideal mobile app store.

Web and mobile

Apple has pretty much nailed the idea of a cross-platform app store that you can browse both from your phone and on your PC. As more mobile users upgrade to smartphones, the idea of sideloading stuff from PC to mobile is becoming much less of a geeky niche.

PC or web-based app stores offer some advantages over their mobile equivalents - more space for descriptions and multimedia elements, and an easier browsing experience. But there still needs to be the mobile version too. One thing the App Store does well is make checking out apps on the go utterly seamless. You need both - one without the other is missing an opportunity.

Open to all

If we've learned anything from iPhone, it's that the good ideas don't just come from big publishers. When it comes to people serving up new games for us to play, the more developers the merrier.

Hundreds of independent developers are realising that they don't necessarily need a publishing deal to have a hit game, if the barriers to making their titles available on a store are removed.

Not that we're knocking the big guys - the likes of Gameloft and EA Mobile's high-quality titles are just as important to an app store as the indie curveball hits. Yes, the price for allowing anyone to launch games is a certain amount of clutter. But that's where our next wish comes in...

Effective filtering tools

The more games that are available, the more pearls there are to find. But how to find them? An essential part of any app store is decent search and filtering tools, enabling you to find the good stuff quickly and easily. And this is one area where the App Store currently falls down a bit.

As a gamer, there are two key criteria I want to use to filter the games on an app store. First, I want to know what's new - what's really new, as opposed to what old games have just been patched.

An option to quickly scan all the games that have been released today, this week, this month or even since the last time I logged on (if that's tracked) would be invaluable.

But even more important is the inclusion of user ratings, and the ability to use those user ratings as my main search criteria. Probably combined with genre - show me all the racing games on your store, sorted by user rating, for example.

With most app stores ramping up quickly to several thousand games, search and filtering tools become even more essential. Which can also include...

Some recommendation aspects

Alongside discovery, recommendation is the other important aspect to any decent app store. Rather than me searching for stuff, how can the store recommend games it thinks I might like? There are several ways of doing this, all of which can be seen on various websites and services.

So, there's Amazon's 'people who bought this also bought that' model - a hugely powerful feature if the resulting recommendations are appealing.

There are also more analytical models, where the characteristics of a game are compared to others, so that similar titles can be suggested.

This is one area where I'm happy to have my data mined for the purposes of serving me better. A weekly email saying 'based on your previous purchases, you may like x, y and z new games'? My wallet would be constantly opening. And recommendation doesn't have to stop there - it can tie in with some of the social aspects covered later in this article.

Screenshots, videos and emulator demos

Particularly on PC or web versions of an app store, the more information that's available on games, the better. Apple's App Store has screenshots, but not videos, despite the fact that it has videos for the traditional iPod games that it sells. Seeing a game in motion is surely an important way to tempt people into parting with their cash.

And if you don't want to have your own technology doing this, how about giving developers the option to embed a YouTube video in every product page? An increasing number of mobile devs and publishers are using YouTube to show off their games, and this could be drawn into the average app store interface.

Would videos work on mobile app stores? They should do - plenty of handsets are being released touting their integration with YouTube.

Getting back to PC-based app stores, there's also a case for including emulated demos where possible, allowing people to try a game out on-screen for a minute or two. Services like Mpowerplayer offer this, but it's yet to be incorporated into an app store.

Have a plan for Lite demos

The way demos are handled on the App Store is a bit of a bodge - developers release Lite versions and then try to upsell gamers to the premium versions, which are separate apps entirely. Far more elegant is the N-Gage way of doing things, where you download the whole game for free, but only a small element of it is playable until you pay to unlock the rest.

Elegant for consumers, but technically complex for the likes of Apple to implement now. At the very least, an app store should have a clear way of identifying and sorting free demos and separating them from full games, even if it's just in a 'demos' section.

Simple billing mechanic

I don't care how you charge me for the games I buy, as long as the payment process is uber-simple. I'll set it up once with my credit card details (the App Store model), have games charged to my mobile bill (N-Gage) or even use PayPal or an equivalent service linked to my bank account (Android Market, at some point). as long as I don't have to think about several steps of paying for something every time I want to do it. This point isn't rocket science, of course.

A professional reviews element

You could accuse me of having a vested interest here – PocketGamer.biz parent company Steel Media syndicates the reviews from Pocket Gamer to mobile operator portals (a model that could just as easily work for app stores). But trust me when I say that having professional reviews as an element in an app store would be a great thing for consumers.

Evidence? Amazon again - the web store. When buying books, gadgets, music or other products, the professional reviews are as important to me as the user ratings and reviews - the two sit together and perform different roles.

iPhone, N-Gage, Android and other mobile platforms all have their own networks of review sites like Pocket Gamer and its rivals, so it stands to reason that the content these sites are producing could be incorporated or linked to in some way.

The question is who does it - the app store owner (which requires deals and back-end integration) or the publishers (which means negative reviews wouldn't feature).

Or does the store owner hire its own editorial team to write reviews of key titles as they go on sale? It's an area worth exploring - imagine if the App Store had some kind of Metacritic-style feature gathering reviews of iPhone games from the key websites in the space...

Better sharing features

One low-profile feature of the App Store is the ability - when browsing on your iPhone - to email game links to friends with the tap of a button. I've used it lots when discovering something cool.

But it would be great to see app stores build on this kind of feature, in the same way that blogs and websites increasingly make it easy for you to share and recommend content.

For example, imagine product pages with quick buttons or links to post about them on Facebook or Twitter? Or going a step further, the option to sign into an App Store using OpenSocial or Facebook Connect, and thus get the ability to share your favourites with your social networks, and see what else your friends have been downloading.
That’s a few ideas, but what do you think? What features would you like to see in mobile application stores that aren’t mentioned? Post a comment and we’ll kickstart the debate.