You bring up several important issues and I agree with you 100%.
A lot of good application/utilities in the past were from engineers who needed the tools themselves, developed them, and then released it open source.
But I can also see the clutter argument. Windows app store has been and still is a nightmare to use.
It feels like we had a good system, but then lost it. I have no idea what it takes to get it back.
A great addition to this would be if everything was synched from a central server.
20 commuters pressing their toes down and letting out a sigh at the same time.
It would be like a multiplayer protest against attention-grabbing phones. Everybody playing the game would know if someone else was playing the game, but no one else.
It may defeat the original purpose of the game to blend in, but I think it could be pretty fun to observe something like that.