Maintainer

defining those as variant of the same thing

Yes, this could be an option (especially for existing apps). Personally I'd really like to discourage forks with minor changes though - it's better for everyone (IMO) if a feature can be added to the original app, rather than having 5 apps each with extra features, but not one app that has them all. Not to mention what a nightmare maintenance is.

While we could add an option to mark deprecated someone has to actually do that, and realistically that's going to mean that it'll end up being my job to try and 'clear up' after everyone else, and then get shouted at by the one person that still uses said deprecated app.

There are definitely cases (eg minimal clocks like Anton Clock) where just expanding the app turned out to be a bad idea, but it seems like having at most two apps - the basic one, and a ++ version, is probably better for the majority of users.