RSSApple's App Store hits 100K apps: News or rhetoric?
By Tim Conneally | Published November 4, 2009, 2:19 PM
Apple today announced that its App store has more than 100,000 apps available for download and use on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The number of applications available on the platform has been a major selling point for Apple's iPhone, and the company has made sure to keep the public informed when its catalog grows. In July, the company announced when it had hit 65,000 available apps; and In September, it let us know when it had exceeded 85,000.
In fact, ever since July 2008, when the App Store debuted with only 500 apps, the number of available applications has been used as a running tally to illustrate how much more viable a platform the iPhone is than its competitors.
In every announcement related to the App Store's number of apps or downloads this year, Phil Schiller uses the same adjective to describe the App Store: Revolutionary.
But here's the brilliant thing about this which people often overlook: The viability of Apple's platform has little to do with its own actions.
It's the same phenomenon that made social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook so successful: Any number of social networks had equally usable platforms, but they just didn't have the user momentum. People don't use a social network based upon the platform, they use it for the other people who are already there. It's the same with the App Store. Developers have rushed to put out as many apps as they can because there are people out there downloading them.
Michael Gartenberg, vice president of Strategy and Analysis at Interpret, LLC, said it very succinctly last week: "Apple didn't make iPhone a success. Microsoft didn't make Windows a success. Google didn't make search a success. People did that for them."
So is it news that 100,000 apps have been created for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform?
Yes.
But it's not an achievement by Apple. As Phil Schiller has repeatedly said, it's a revolution, an action of the people.
Hey my car just turned 100K also..
are they really apps. IE: photo of Baby, Shake it, eye's turn to X. shake again... over and over .. that is a cheap flash thing.
At least people are not telling me they are working on a iPhone app and should be very rich soon.....
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|I'm using an android mobile, there's of course less app. but there's also many many app. and they are often doing the same job. If we look closely. there's around 10 to 20 app that everybody uses. The other app are for fun, are installed then deleted right away. With 100.000 app in the apple store, the good thing is that we can find an app for anything. But I'm sure that, as for the android market, the main apps installed and used are always the same for the main part of the users.
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|While it's not really news, Apple counted the songs in the store, as well as the video offerings, and now the applications. It is quite an accomplishment, if you compare it to PalmOS or WinCE/PocketPC/WinMobile, which have been around quite a long time.
I've seen a few of the applications and I now have 38 on my iPod touch (it's not iTouch or iPod Touch) and I've deleted, maybe, 5 or 6 others and a few others are off the machine to save space temporarily. In the early days of the store, I think people were buying rampantly anything and everything that they could find.
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|My personal belief at this point is that the 100K App milestone is the point when Apple should switch tactics and focus on something more meaningful than mere quantity, as subsequent numbers become less and less impactful, and we get it, "There's an App for That."
Otherwise, the 'magic' starts to become clinical and cold, which is very un-Apple-like, something that I blogged about in:
iPhone’s 100K Apps is the New '7-Minute Abs'
http://bit.ly/rJkEC
Check it out, if interested.
Mark
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|I don't think the number of apps really matters. The quality of the apps is more important and there's plenty in the 100k that are just plain awful.
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|Where is all the apps that are available on the Hangango app store? Windows mobile has been around a long time and there are tons of quality applications made for it.
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|Wow this is playing into Microsoft's plan for Windows Mobile 7. Having a limited app store with quality apps that are slightly more expensive.
Even *IF* most of those 100,000 apps were actually useful...what kind of loser has time to browse all that stuff?
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|Yep... those last 25 fart apps really put 'em over the top!
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|Even if 'most apps are junk' is true - that is certainly going to be the case for any app store, be it Apple, MS, or Google's Android. So having 100,000 apps vs 10,000 apps (a feat not yet matched by any competition) means your app store is going to have far more quality apps by share volume alone. Apple wins any way you slice and dice it.
The medical community has already adopted iPhone because of the great apps available to doctors and other medical professionals. Chances are very slim it will be taken away.
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|Since when does quantity denote quality? I could have 50,000 apps and only 1% of them are of any use to the general public.
Also, the medical community in and of itself has done no such thing. I would love to see some statistics backing this opinion. I work closely with multiple medical care facilites (I work for a public health department), and I can tell you for a fact that not a single one has adopted the iPhone as their supported on-call or in center device. Doctors may be carrying them as their personal devices, but 99% of the medical care facilites provide their on-call staff with Blackberries coupled with BES.
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|I wouldn't say the medical community has adopted the iPhone as much as it has the iTouch.
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|Please tell me that was a joke? lol
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|In doing a little more research on this (yeah, I'm a bit compulsive that way), it seems that almost 80% (I haven't compiled a full list) of the "applications" in the AppStore that are medical field related are simply facades to mobile, medical web portals, sites, and/or search engines.
Makes you wonder how many other apps in all of the various app stores are also just facades to mobile web sites.
I personally would not count apps in any of the stores that simply expose a web interface to a mobile web site or ones that create shortcuts to mobile web sites, but that is just me...
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|Every single application ever released on Apple's iPhone store is useful. I'm not sure what every one else is talking about. Even the "I am Rich" application was an useful app, even if it was just useful for one person. I would love for someone to state just one app that they believe is useless and why they think it's useless.
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|Sure, the I am Rich application was useful in bringing someone 15 minutes of fame and it was also useful in showing that some people will buy anything. In the end, Apple refunded the money.
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|That's too bad. If someone is stupid enough to click on a button for a $999 app just to see if the button really works they shouldn't get their money back.
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|Rhetoric. Like everyone said, some of them are junk. This could be 100,001 with Google Voice *wink2*
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|I love my "last years model" iphone that I bought this feb, but i agree with bigsexy and take it a step further by saying MOST of those apps are junk!
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|Rhetoric yes, but it also matters. It's a selling point to tell the people. Looks good on paper to. But Many of those 100k apps are crap. Alot are not mind you. Because there is so much interest in making apps many good ones do get made. But there is alot of junk to surf thru. Also it's harder sometimes to come across a gem that had been avoided for no good reason. Either way it's good for iphone users and apple itself. I may have tried 500 apps so far. So basically i had missed alot of good and bad apps cause i dont have time.
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|The Apple HW platform is part of the magic. Google is hoping to displace Apple with Android, but Android has to run on different processors and HW. Android developers therefore have to program in the comparatively slow Java. Apple HW is all the same, so developers can program in 'C' which compiles and runs MUCH faster. High performance immersive 3D iPhone apps like "Shatter 3D", for example, would be virtually impossible to even consider writing for Android.
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|The compilation speed of a language has nothing do with execuction speed or graphics performance. Also, the disparity of hardware has nothing to do with the language choice. Java was chosen for Android as it was a) open source, and b) available to about 3 times the amount of developers in comparison to Objective-C. The amount of complexity that Objective-C has associated with it, I personally would choose Java any day (I've developed in both, and can tell you that anything I have done in ObjC has taken me 3 times longer than the same thing in Java).
For a more objective opinion, check out: http://greensopinion.blo...iphone-development.html
Aside from that, there are 3D games available for Android. Have a look at Speed Forge or some of the other 3D games that are available for Android (http://androidandme.com/tag/android-3d-games/).
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|Java has always been really, really slow compared to a platform dependent language like C or its variants or even assembly language.
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|Agreed... My point was that compilation speed has nothing to do with execution speed.
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