Honestly, i feel like app store lack of documentation. Are there any validation to verify that is working well at client or not ?
Some of widget are not up to date and using this may cause production problem. Are there any paid widget ? so this will encourage the developer to work more seriously on their quality.
Thanks
What might be a good idea is to show a score in the app store that gives you insight into the compliance of the component. This must be calculated frequently ...
What could be a reliable and sustainable incentive for widget providers to provide first class documentations and to keep their widgets and documentations up to date?
I don't believe paid widgets are a solution to a documentation/support problem.
I mean you pay for the widget and then you have the widget, doesn't mean you paid for it to be up to date and working for every Mendix release.
The only thing I would suggest Mendix does is revamp and expand it's guidelines / documentation / tutorials / widget boilerplate on how to build a proper documented widget. And also give Mendix developers a heads up about deprecation of functionality or upcoming changes that relate to the front end.
Because the problem you describe is just a result of the framework that has been changing over the years throughout Mendix 5 to 7 and now there are TypeScript widgets/ React widgets / jQuery widgets and inconsistent implementations of code.
Maybe the releasing of a widget into the public AppStore maybe should go through a more strict validation process so that the quality of code is preserved.
Then again, the fact that they share the widgets for free and are available to fork through GitHub allows you to fork it and fix it yourself.
Edit:
Just another note, maybe a good addition would be for the AppStore to allow warning users about deprecation of the widget beyond a certain version. Something which should be checked before upgrading your project to a newer version. Maybe throws a warning like "these widgets in your project are currently unstable or unsupported by the version you're trying to upgrade to"
I'm not sure there is a need for paid widgets, but I agree that there is an issue with the quality/support of widgets in the app store. There are lots of widgets that I need in my projects, but I can't use them because they don't work in new versions of the modeler, or don't work on mobile, or aren't stable enough, etc. Especially with the recent release of Nanoflows, I expect only very few community-developed extensions to implement Nanoflow support anytime soon.
Perhaps the issue is that many developers don't see a reason to publicly distribute their custom widgets for free. In this case, enabling paid widgets might make sense.