I do app window shopping, but only on F-Droid. I rarely install any of the apps I see, but occasionally I stumble across an open-source tool I didn't know I wanted. E.g. recently I found Pocket Paint, a neat little drawing app. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.catrobat.paintroid/ I mostly use it for quickly annotating screenshots, which it's much better suited for than my previous solution of just using the stock image viewer's editing capabilities. Especially Pocket Paint's layer support is quite handy for quickly hiding/showing annotations.

I window shop for apps - mostly games, honestly. One of the great things about a phone is that some things, like waiting in a waiting room or spending time on the toilet, are simply less boring because of games. And while I have a few that stay on my phone/tablet, sometimes I Just want new adventures.

Playing bad games is now part of my life experience, kinda like trying out bad movies.

That happened in the very first few years of the app stores. People were paying ridiculous amounts of money for them, especially on the App Store. Then the stores were snowed under with apps, undiscoverability prevailed, lately complemented by the fear of installing badly vetted malicious apps.

I didn't install any game on my last two phones. I install only mandated apps (banking, car sharing, etc) and open source apps after I checked that they actually have a repository and they are not abandoned. I'm rather using F-Droid than the Play Store now.

Oddly enough I was just thinking the same thing. From what I can remember every ( Android) app that I've ever installed has come from a recommendation from somewhere else. I can't see how you'd ever get any traction if you mainly relied on the app store search results.