I think I've only seen the idea of a Drupal App Store floated on Twitter. However as the movement continues for the meta-issue on making core maintainable, I can totally see what the Drupal App Store people were talking about. It's just too bad they associated with with a highly profitable monster corporation.

One thing Drupal does leverage better than any other is a single, central authority for downloading contributed modules and Drupal doesn't use that to its advantage as I think it could. Let's not call that central location a Drupal App Store. Let's just call it the Drupal Module Installer. I bet someone at Lullabot can come up with a better name, but it can't have "App" or "Store" in it.

I think the overall Drupal maintainability issues is a symptom to the need for an improvement to the module search and installation process. If you could browse popular modules in contrib from your Drupal site, which don't come included in the .tar.gz, and then could install them without having to do extra chmodding, ftp, or sftp config, then that's the vision I see for the how to get this kind of functionality as part of an install profile.

The installer should have some magic sauce to handle the installation. It's possible that it could borrow from the Drush engine, but Drupal should never expect the average Drupal site administrator to need to resort to using a terminal to install a module. Solve the issue of difficult interaction with contrib, and issues like arguing about OpenID, blog, and poll in core I think will go away because then putting OpenID in core will be a transparent matter of `drush dl openid` in the background magic sauce.

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