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