With its second birthday just behind it Apple’s App Store now boasts 300,000 Apps. The App Store Gnomes are apparently pumping around 1000 new Apps per day into the store, once they have tortured them for long enough to ensure they are up to scratch.
Just under two-thirds of the total apps in iTunes are paid apps. Games still come a close second to Books as the most downloaded media both having a smidgen under 17% each of overall downloads.
One thing worth considering is that this figure is not necessarily showing us the whole picture. Although it is probably a good estimate, there are a lot of apps which have been in the App Store, but have been taken off sale. However, as a counterpoint to that, this most recent survey data, collated by Mobclix, does not take into account many apps sold outside the US.
The Android Marketplace is fast on the heels of the App Store, now reported as having over 100,000 apps.
Both marketplaces are set to grow further as we get closer to the end of the year but the Android Marketplace is expected to do so more, as a shower of new Android tablet devices hit highstreet shelves.
Will Android Apps overtake those of iOS in 2011? When will the App Store hit 1 Million apps? 2011 or 2012? Have your say in the comments.
[via VentureBeat]Advertisement
One Comment on ““Apple’s App Store Passes 300,000 Apps Milestone””
With content apps proliferating like websites did in the mid 1990s, does it even make sense to count the number of apps? With Apple encouraging every possible content app to be put on app store, many developers are just moving their web content to these iPhone apps. Probably with time, these apps will become unmanageable especially since we don’t have a search mechanism to scan the content of these apps. The app store search from Apple currently relies on the app name and the short description to generate search results; the content inside the app is not searchable.
So, the question is how do we find the apps we need, how do we rank them? If number of apps increase beyond a threshold, will number of sales remain a good measure of utility of the app since newer, lower ranked apps will continue to stay at the bottom and go unnoticed in the midst of a sea of apps for a topic. App store will only get messy with increasing number of apps.