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Apple leads the App Store race with 170,000 apps

by Michael Grothaus Mar 20th 2010 at 8:00PM

Silicon Alley Insider has posted an interesting chart that shows the total number of apps available across various mobile platforms. As you can see from the chart, Apple's iPhone leads the pack by a longshot with 170,000 apps according to AppShopper.com. AppShopper typically lists more apps than Apple publicly states it has because AppShopper updates its numbers on a daily basis. As of today's count, AppShopper says Apple has approved 198,924 apps with 171,722 available to download. The discrepancy between the numbers accounts for apps that either the developers or Apple have removed from the App Store. Apple officially states that it currently has 150,000 apps.

A distant second after Apple's App Store is Google's Android Marketplace with 30,000 apps. RIM's Blackberry trails with only 5,000 apps, while Palm has a paltry 2,000. Windows Phone 7 Series Applications were announce a few days ago with a limited number of developers signed on. Of course, these numbers don't take app quality into account at all (100,000 fart apps is still just a bunch of junk), but clearly in terms of available downloads, Apple has a huge lead.

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Silicon Alley Insider has posted an interesting chart that shows the total number of apps available across various mobile platforms. As...
 

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Anthony

What about the Nokia Ovi Store?

April 01 2010 at 12:49 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stephen Antonucci

Apple rejected or expelled more good apps than most of these other platforms ever had!

March 21 2010 at 7:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Stephen Antonucci's comment
Tom

Stephen,

That's exactly right:

http://treestman.posterous.com/despite-standards-apples-app-store-is-kicking

March 22 2010 at 1:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jbelkin

The Android store on the chart should actually be divided out by OS since if your carrier has not updated the store, even if you hack and upgrade your firmware ... plus the limitation of @500 MB will always be a killer AND that Android users mostly bought it to claim they are open source which means they don't really believe they need to pay for apps.

March 21 2010 at 1:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
pittens

"Saw somewhere on the web that in 2009 99.4% of all dollars spent on mobile device software/accessories where iphone/ipod touch related."

I saw a statistic on a game for sale on the iPhone which could track pirates on it's high score server. 70% were on jailbroken iPhones. This is the "information wants to be free" section of the iPhone, and that part of the market is seceding to the Android where they aren't controlled by nasty old Apple, and can get their boobie applications without jailbreaking. Android is taking the Open Source fanatics from everywhere else.

The "free as in beer" market has a monetization value of exactly zero. Or as close as makes no difference ( and off the top of your head can you remember reading about a rags to riches story on the Android? Or see games developers - who are making boatloads of money on the iPhone - flocking to it).

Nope. That constituency does not pay for anything. It is not a market which can be monetized.

March 21 2010 at 11:29 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to pittens's comment
Cy Starkman

Oh but they pay....

It's a strange acceptance I don't quite understand.

People willing to forego privacy, accept having everything they do on a device logged and used against them in the form of spam.

Google is the ad king of the world, android is a mobile ad delivery system that happens to have the functions to make it better for ad delivery and harvesting ad targeting information.

Most jailbroken iPhones I know aren't trying to pirate, they are running backgrounder and winterboard. They are tweakers

March 21 2010 at 6:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Joe Wood

The AppStore is so far ahead in terms of Apps it's not even fair. It doesn't matter how many are crap or useless, it's still an app and someone finds those fun and entertaining.

I sell cell phones and play with Andriod phones all day, they have ALOT of crap apps. The biggest thing that will kill Andriod is the fact that over 65% of Android users will NOT pay for ANY apps! They brag about it too, 'I haven't paid for a single App! I be you have!'. If developers want to make money, they will go to the AppStore, Android doesn't have virtually any premium usefull apps.

AppStore has thousands, including my all-time favorite MLB.COM At Bat!

Palm, although struggling, actually has premium Apps, Gameloft has tons of 3D games on there. I wish they weren't struggling...

March 21 2010 at 10:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mikko

It is not a race.

March 21 2010 at 4:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Mikko's comment
Jabbathewocket

Its not a race, but there is momentum.. the history of devices of all kinds that failed for lack of content (both real and perceived) is enough to make every consumer who is not biased in some way think long and hard before investing in any extensible platform..

It doesn't matter if you have 2000 apps and they are all INCREDIBLE, and fill every need.. if the consumer buying the DEVICE feels that there may not be what he wants, he wont buy, and if consumers don't buy.. then developers don't develop..

Its a vicious cycle into the graveyard of failed devices (many of which took down the company who created them)

March 21 2010 at 9:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Cy Starkman

So with all this touting of how many apps, useless, duplicate function etc...

170,000 is huge. If you consider the consoles, handheld included how many apps would be in each of them. I found a number of 259 for PS3 but it wasn't dated

or how many are available that run on current Win, Mac or Linux.

The iPhone platform in less than 2 yrs has 170k, even halved to say each has a free version which they don't is 85k. So that's very loosely 40k per annum. Does modern windows (from 2000) have 400,000 applications?

Are there even 400,000 applications available? Why has this never been tracked to any level (by any I realise it is easier when they are all in one place).

How about for all Nintendo platforms since NES. 20,000? 40,000?

Looking at other platforms prior to Appstore I'd sorta get the feeling that unless a platform is dying the number of apps written each year is about the same or greater.

So what's that mean, the AppStore will have (on the cut back numbers) 400,000 apps by 2017 or rather 1,000,000 based on actual. Is that even meaningful or possible. Do we do 1million different things.

A point of note with the AppStore to counter the "inflated" numbers is that there are no versions. Arguably there are 11 photoshops not including point updates. On the Appstore there would always be one.

As a final WTF. who is writing all this code anyway, I just read there are over 30,000 apps on facebook. Is every 100th person a coder now?

March 21 2010 at 4:02 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Cy Starkman's comment
Jabbathewocket

Heh, yes everyone is a coder, 400,000,000 facebook users, 1 million developers 500,000 apps (facebook's glory numbers from http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

Not sure how they classify things as apps.. but all of those numbers dwarf the app store.. and yet.. Apple is really the ONLY store that is making any money at all ..

Saw somewhere on the web that in 2009 99.4% of all dollars spent on mobile device software/accessories where iphone/ipod touch related..

thats 99 cents out of every dollar .. though i somehow think that they conveniently are ignoring the everpopular ringtone market, and carrier "value adds" in those figures, as well as including all the "not iphone/ipod touch specific" gadgets/accessories in the numbers.

Still the numbers are staggering..

March 21 2010 at 9:15 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Max

170.000?... Woooowww!!! (fanboy style)
Lets count lite and full apps as one, lests remove all crap rss site-spesific readers and some other crap...

March 21 2010 at 3:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
macserv

Yeah, it bugged me as well... for Palm it's "2K", but Blackberry has "5000". Not that it's anything surreptitious, it's just inconsistent.

March 21 2010 at 1:00 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rego

"As you can see from the chart, Apple's iPhone leads the pack by a longshot with 170,000 apps according to AppShopper.com"

While your meaning is clear, from the context, "longshot" is not the English word that conveys your intended meaning.

long shot (longshot)
noun
a venture or guess that has only the slightest chance of succeeding or being accurate : it's a long shot, but well worth trying.

Go Apple!

March 20 2010 at 11:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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