The App Store: 250,000 apps and growing

I do not consider a number that is less than a million, but can be expressed as a fraction of a million, with the fraction being a multiple of ¼ (i.e. ¼ million, ½ million, ¾ million) to be a "minor" milestone. Minor milestones for numbers between 100,000 and 1,000,000 involve all fractions with denominators "d" equal to 3, or greater than 4, with a numerator less than "d".

A quarter million apps in the App Store. Impressive.

Ok, fat-fingered the bitly - http://bit.ly/joglog

"The majority of apps are book apps, followed by games" ? As in, over 50% of the apps are books? I would think you mean the largest category is book apps. I also would be interested in seeing a pie chart based on ratings.

250k apps and growing makes it a lot harder for good apps to stand out. We've been having hard time getting our Jog Log app (www.joglogapp.com or bit.ly/joglog for iTunes) to stay in the top 50 of our category. The people who buy our app, absolutely love it (seriously, 90% of support emails we get start with "I love your app!"), but app discovery remains difficult. Marketing is practically impossible since blogs (including TUAW) won't give us the time of day. We even are integrating heart rate with an update this week which a lot of people have been asking for all over the web, but no blogs seem to care.

And about 250 useful apps!
I'd say there are about 20 goto apps on m iPhone and maybe 60 novelty apps. (old arcade games mostly). My main frustration with iPhone apps is a lack of integration of some sort and that you often need 3 apps to get the functionality you'd like in just one.
Also, iOS? It's getting stale.

Back in the day we Mac Evangelists used to argue that “Sure we have fewer apps, but they’re better in quality.”. Some apps did fart, but that wasn’t their only function: http://www.jschilling.net/sw_icat.php

I will like to see this 250K apps breaked by ratings in a pie

Maybe if you hadn't read and commented on this minor milestone TUAW might have got the message. But you did, so they'll continue updating us with every minor milestone cos that's what the people (you) are giving page views to.

I was going to make a "cue the 'iFart apps' troll" comment, but they seem to have gotten there first.

That number mean nothing when only 5% of the apps are actually useful. The major it of app in the app store are novelty items.