Filed under: Software, iTunes, Apple, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
App Store reaches 20,000 apps
Our friends over at Apptism, a site that tracks and rates App Store apps, have pointed out that their counter recently flipped over the big two-zero... zero zero zero. That's right, only three months after hitting the 10,000 mark (and that took only six months), the amount of apps in the store has doubled, and there's no sign the acceleration will be stopping any time soon.The ease of development in the iPhone SDK, combined with the huge success of the device and Apple's own promotion revolving around how many apps are in the store, mean that the platform is taking off like a rocket. Sure, numbers aren't necessarily the best indicator of quality (anyone want to speculate how many of the 20,000 apps have to do with farting or belching?), but the fact is that people are both developing and consuming apps from the App Store in gigantic numbers. How long before we reach 50,000 different applications on the iPhone? A million?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
brian said 4:44PM on 2-10-2009
What ...??? are you serious...10k apps in 3 months??
I think creating apps for iPhone seems to be really easy...even kids (under 15) have started doing it....
http://www.livbit.com
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jack.mac1 said 4:45PM on 2-10-2009
i believe that there are not yet 20000 apps that are on the app store now but 20000 different apps have been on the app store which means that quite a few are no longer on the app store due to numerous reasons, www.appshopper.com gives a move accurate live app count
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Fred said 5:06PM on 2-10-2009
How many of them fart?
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Doug said 5:17PM on 2-10-2009
Actually the total number of apps that are displayed at the top of AppTism isn't a legit total. Yes 20,000 have been submitted and accepted,but this doesn't count for apps that have been removed/banned.
The actual total is more like 19000. give or take 200-300.
@jack, there's about 60 to 65 farting apps
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Dave said 5:20PM on 2-10-2009
And yet for all this I'm still waiting for a good Word doc editor... :-\
Remember Docs2Go on the Palm? That was a great little program.
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Ed said 5:20PM on 2-10-2009
What about removing all the free 'lite' versions ... I'd guess maybe 10% have lite versions.
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Galley said 5:40PM on 2-10-2009
Not to mention apps that come in 20 different versions, such as travel guides, and the like.
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Petar Smilajkov said 6:25PM on 2-10-2009
It would be GREAT if out of those 20,000 apps 80% we're not useless piece of crap, and other 20% good apps.
Also - it'd be great if the developers would use http://iBetaTest.com more to test their apps, and not publish ones that crash all the time, so we have to wait for months for updates and fixes before we can finally use what we paid for.
iBetaTest.com - a must!
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required said 7:21PM on 2-10-2009
Great follow up to your "31 fart apps in 90 seconds" posting.
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Michael Cheung said 7:22PM on 2-10-2009
some "apps" are just ridiculous.
Farting apps... travel guide apps... language translation apps... ebooks.... for every Jane Eyre novel there seems to be 10 apps, each proclaiming something like like "We allow inverting colours!" or "We do auto-scrolling!"
Since iShoot shot to fame because it didn't get traction until it released a Lite version and then rocketed to #1, every other game developer has released Lite versions too. So that just about doubles the games there.... which is already the largest segment of the App Store.
So, all in all, I reckon only about 20-30% of that figure relates to actual unique apps that offer value for money. Quite astonishing really.
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smcquar said 8:17PM on 2-10-2009
Seriously 10k , 20k in apps but how many of them are even useful? Not to be a negative nancy but there may be perhaps 30 decent apps / games out of the whole list (and i'm being generous) . The iTunes app's store needs to be cleaned. There doesn't need to be 20 flatulence sound apps, 10-15 flashlights or any of the vast amount of duplicated crud >:(
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(01) said 9:29PM on 2-10-2009
once again proving that quantity doesn't equal quality...
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Dave said 11:23PM on 2-10-2009
I think a much easier way of searching is needed for applications that users are searching for. That will assist in making a variety of programs grow more popular, at a faster rate.
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iphonerulez said 7:01AM on 2-11-2009
Is the ratio of good apps to bad apps as worse than any other mobile platform? It's almost like people are implying that if you went through all the Palm or WinMo apps that were available, there weren't any fart apps or travel guide apps. Does the Apple Mobile platform alone only have a huge amount of crappy apps or lite versions? 20,000 or so apps should still be relatively impressive for such a short amount of time since the SDK was available.
So impressive that RIM, Google and Microsoft suddenly want a piece of the pie with their own versions of App Store.
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Johnny said 12:20PM on 2-11-2009
So.. You see what they did there, didn't you? They created a demand for native apps by not allowing them originally and then making it stupid easy to develop for and obtain the software when they did allow it. I guess it isn't really any big secret that they do this, but I just thought I'd point it out. They did the same thing with 3G. The same will happen when/if they allow MMS, Flash, copy/paste or any of those other features everyone wants; They'll act like they invented it and everyone will rush out to buy a new one because they think they have to have it. Hopefully, I'll be in line before you. lol.
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