Android Now Boasting 200,000 Apps
Natesh Sood | Dec 28, 2010 | 1 comment
AndroLib, a website which keeps tabs on the amount and types of apps in the Android Market, has released a new bar graph detailing the amount of apps in the Market. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly (depending on how you look at it), the Android Market now boasts a little over 200,000 apps. Even though this isn’t an official statistic released by Google, it definitely provides a glimpse at how many apps there are. I bet the error margin is only within 5,000 – 10,000 apps at most.
iPhone users love to boast how many apps the iOS app store contains, but it’s hard to argue with an OS that supports around 200,000 apps. At this rate, it should only be another few months until the Android Market hits 250,000.
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Natesh,
Whether there are 100,000, 200,000 or 1 million apps is meaningless while Google lets any junk, spam, malware, “hello world” or test app etc into the Android Marketplace. Also, “apps” in the Android Marketplace include wallpapers, widgets, soundboards and ringtones making the total of actual apps far less.
Recently, AppBrain posted that 45,000 of the 100,000 apps in the Android Marketplace were spam apps. That makes almost half of Android’s “app” total spam!
John “DVD ” Lech Johansen, the author of DoubleTwist the popular iTunes replacement for Android has this to say about the Android Marketplace:
“Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple’s App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps…. just a few examples of what’s wrong with the Android Market. … 144 spam ringtone apps (which are clearly infringing copyright) are currently cluttering the top ranks of the Multimedia category… Developers and users are getting fed up and it’s time for Google to clean up the house.”
An indication of the difference in quantity of quality apps between iOS and Android is no more evident than in the extremely important gaming category. Android is severely lacking in big name game titles from all of the largest mobile game publishers with only 16 games from Gameloft, Capcom Mobile, EA, Ngmoco, Pangea, Popcap and ID versus 309 from these publishers for Apple’s iOS. Likewise, there are 38,000 games in total for iOS vs 13,000 for Android.
Although Popcap and EA have said they will start porting some games to Android soon, this disparity is not likely to change much with iOS developers making 50x the income ($1 billion) compared to Android ($21 million) over a similar timeframe according to Larva Labs and with piracy ranging from 50-97% on Android.
Raw numbers do not a complete picture paint.
-Mart