RSSThe iTunes App Store at 100,000: Can we stop counting, already?
By Carmi Levy | Published November 12, 2009, 2:46 PM
Ever since Apple launched its App Store barely 16 months ago, we've paid a lot of attention -- indeed, too much -- to the number of applications it contains. As the App Store crossed the 100,000 title barrier last week, it occurred to me that the bigger this number gets, the less it actually means.
I get that Apple has won the sheer-number sweepstakes. I appreciate that no other mobile storefront can even come close. I also understand how broad software availability (in terms of sheer numbers as well as ease of acquisition) has helped fuel the growth of the iPhone/iPod touch universe. I just think we attach way too much importance to this single figure, and it distorts our ability to understand ultimate value to end users and developers alike.
So many titles, not enough room
Never mind that no one person could ever assess, let alone install and use, anything approaching a broad cross-section of this ever expanding library. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of these titles are near-dormant, gathering dust while the masses pay attention to newer, higher-profile offerings. Forget that this number is bloated by countless apps that replicate bodily functions, play visual party tricks, and otherwise consume time that could be productively spent...I don't know, composing e-mails to your mother.
Does the world really need fifty different ways to display the time? Or forty-five weather forecasting apps or a couple of hundred alarm clocks? At what point does the sheer size of the library become so large that successive additions become meaningless? I accept that there's a certain value in choice -- that in a tiny library, users would be ill-served by a product category with only a couple of feature-limited, badly integrated choices. A larger playground increases the size of the app-specific talent pool and ensures someone looking for an alarm clock will eventually find what he or she needs.
But there's choice and there's choice. When neighborhood supermarkets replaced the corner store, we all benefitted from greater choice and more competitive pricing. Economies of scale will do that, as stores that buy in larger quantities have greater buying power than those with smaller inventories. But as plain old supermarkets were supplanted by big-box megastores, we ended up with too much of a good thing. A thirty-minute cruise through the aisles easily doubled or tripled as many of us got lost in the cavernous new temples of conspicuous consumption. We'd stand in front of the ketchup shelves, unable to decide between the ten brands, fifteen different sizes, and packaging combinations, and even colors...remember green and purple? We'd end up with more than we needed, or stuff we hadn't intended on buying in the first place.
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Lost in the wilderness
Apple's App Store has gone well beyond the big-box stage. Shopping there isn't the focused, quick and direct process it once was, and by the time most of us are done loading up on new code, we inevitably end up with stuff we didn't want or need in the first place. Worse for Apple, it can't simply build a bigger building to house all its new inventory. Computer and iPhone screens aren't getting bigger, and new and existing titles find themselves fighting for an ever dimmer slice of virtual storefront for consumers' increasingly ADHD-infused attention.
It hurts developers as well as consumers. We wrestle with the challenge of finding what we want without pulling our hair out in the process, while developers simply try to avoid getting lost in the ever growing ocean of offerings -- assuming, of course, that they can get past Apple's app approval process to get into that ocean in the first place.
I hesitate to blame Apple, as it's simply riding the wave of the most buzzworthy mobile device to hit consumers' radar since Ford's Model T. As long as we're content to measure the iPhone platform's worth by the number of available apps, Apple is perfectly content to trumpet each major milestone, and absolutely justified in doing so. For a company that has long prided itself on simple, easily understood methods for users, nothing's easier to articulate than a big number that dwarfs all competitors, and keeps getting bigger on a seemingly exponential path.
Even if, from where I sit, it's an ultimately meaningless number, it remains a marketer's dream, so don't expect Apple to stop flogging it.
New ways to measure
Still, it leaves the door open for measures of value that reflect actual utility. Google's Android platform may sport a software library that's an order of magnitude smaller than Apple's, but Google doesn't live in the same download-and-use universe that Apple does. Its core strength lies in its expanding universe of increasingly integrated Web-based services. And successive generations of its mobile platform will reflect this shifting reality, especially as 3G wipes GSM and CDMA off the map, and 4G-based technologies like LTE move into the mainstream.
It may seem laughable now given AT&T's and other carriers' troubles with network coverage of any kind, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, mobile bandwidth will be so abundant that the same paradigms of always-on Web services that we take for granted on our conventional laptops and desktops will seamlessly apply to our smartphones as well. And the download-and-use metaphor will fade.
So although the size of Google's library currently places it in a firm second place in the mobile online store rankings and gives it a fair degree of street cred, I doubt Google hangs on the daily figures as much as Apple does given the sea change that will fundamentally change how we get work (and play) done on mobile devices.
For now, though, we still measure our devices by the number of apps available for download, and we continue to focus on quantity when handicapping the various platforms against each other. As mobile infrastructure matures and consumers improve their ability to assess the value proposition of a platform's complete feature set -- and not just its simple library size -- simply having the biggest of anything may no longer be enough to sustain interest. Bigger, after all, isn't always better.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
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Score: -3
|I'll admit BlackBerry and iPhone receives alot of apps that are crap. Majority of them are duplicates or program that'll direct you to a web site. Remember the apps on the iPhone? Someone paid $100 for an app. All that person got was a star on their iPhone. Someone should monitor all these fake money making apps... even the free apps. They'll only gives you a 1 day trial and then buy.
Score: 2
|I find this very unimpressive actually. Most of those 100,000 apps are utter and complete crap. Especially considering Apple blocks most of the good ones.
Score: 4
|Many choices doesn't guarantee apps get lost, it guarantees that apps have to get better. If you don't know about the 5+ sites dedicated to 3rd party reviews of the app store or the 10+ major tech sites that routinely review new apps, or can't find a resource that can provide an opinion on the best 3-5 apps of any given category... well, you may be very slow or an Apple hater. The situation for discovery will just get better.
And, of course, the same can be said of Windows apps. But of course, if you are in an industry, you know the leading apps; if you have an interest, you know the best apps... or at least you shop them and/or make some choice from the apps you do know. It's not a horror story.
I'm looking forward to the next phase of the apps store as apps become more robust, (maybe) more expensive, and define themselves as category leaders. Hell, this is already happen: I can name 1-3 apps that are great in about 30 categories. I made this discovery without needing to wade through all 100,000+ of them.
Score: -2
|Amen, brother. While I truly despise Apple for their ripoff rates on what SHOULD be commodity technology (and thankfully always DOES become so within a year or two, despite Apple's efforts), I did recommend an iPhone to a few friends who don't need QWERTY, since it's the best platform for the next 2 years and ONLY because of the add-on apps.
Of course it's very simple math to understand that the top 1,000 apps would cost a max of $50m to develop within 6-months for Windows Mobile 7 or 8, so eventually Microsoft will either integrate the functionality of many of the 1,000 top iPhone apps, or entice developers to make them as affordable as possible, by giving out $50,000 prizes to the top installed 100-1000 apps -- that'll give a developer a clear incentive to drop his price below market-forces-value just to gain popularity and hence the $50K MS subsidy.
Apple can't afford to do that. That is why in the biz world, whoever outspends, usually wins.
Score: -1
|apple is obsessed with meaningless numbers all the time.
PC probably has gazillion of softwares compare to mac, I didn't see MS bragging about it
PC also has gazillion of peripherals, I didn't see MS bragging about it
Palm Classic has numerous apps as well, never see them say anything about the numbers.
its lame trick prepared for lame fanboys.
Score: 3
|100,000 but how many dublicate programs 40+ fart apps alone.
Score: 3
|Even if there were 5 applications for each function, that would leave 20,000 applications and that's still impressive.
Score: -1
|Then weed out all of the apps that aren't worth the bandwidth and you will have maybe 100 left.
Score: 1
|More choice is ALWAYS better, when it comes to software. Filtering systems will be born as the need arises. Websites will recommend specific apps..groups will sit and determine the real worthiness (per expert opinion) of a massive amount of offering (remember TUCOWS '95-'98?)... They will catalog, they will compare, they will take demo videoclips, whatever will be wanted by the end user, will be provided, simply because this highly relevant info will be in demand...
Score: -1
|Personally, I am not impressed with 100k apps! Give me quality; quantity is not a benchmark when that quantity is 90% JUNK.
Juvenile farting applications are the biggest waste of time there ever was. How do these things get approved by the apple gods when other applications (can we say Google here?) that have something to do with real usability are shunned?? 100k only serves to make it impossible to find an application of any value. Is itunes in reality, a social engineering experiment?
The itunes store front end is a horribly designed application that really only serves as a roadblock. Lot's of improvement needed here!
I laid hands on a Droid phone today and have to say it is not the total answer either. Nice screen, lots of apps both built in and available, but the icons are really too small and too close together for even my mid sized fingers. Keyboard is okay, but the Moto Q phones really set the standard for a qwerty keyboard. Micro SD card is a fantastic idea that lets me use the phone for more than a photo and music tote. Common Apple, give me access to some of that 16gb of memory!
So where do we all go from here??
Moto, I am willing to deal with a larger format (read bigger phone) just to improve the actual usability of the thing. I haven't used a belt clip in years, so a phone in a slim case in my pocket is okay.
Apple, give me real applications, Google navigation, etc. Quit protecting those developers (Tom Tom, Navigon, et.al.) and their high priced applications that don’t work as good as the cheaper dedicated hardware solutions and, PLEASE, don’t put up another waste of time worthless app. Better yet, move all of the JUNK off to a simple WEB site, give everyone access to that and seriously update the itunes store front end.
rant, rant, rant
Score: 5
|This is the same argument Mac users used for years. We don't care how many apps there are. Quality over quantity is always more important. How does it feel to sit on the other side of the fence for a change?
Score: 2
|"This is the same argument Mac users used for years. We don't care how many apps there are. Quality over quantity is always more important. How does it feel to sit on the other side of the fence for a change?"
A valid point, except many of the 'quantity' of applications in the Windows world have been business applications that are needed, and not just 'extra numbers' of applications. Pick an industry, and they have developed applications that are Windows only and NEEDED for doing a job, and the reason these corporation choose Windows software solutions is the ease of development, especially when creating a frontend to older technology yanking and manipulating data from things like old COBOL data sources.
From the airline to the insurance to the medical to the finacial industries, they use and require Windows because not of the 'Windows install base' but the ease of develop and development tools their partners choose to rapidly create and release functional software to do their industry jobs.
(There is a reason why MS Development tools and compiler technology outside of the kiddies is serious and important.)
PS This also applies to the Windows Mobile market, pay attention to service industries and notice the guys installing your cable or phone or doing work at your house often have Windows Mobile phones (from years ago) that they are running specific and simply developed software for their job, in addition to doing remote server access and other software access features that to this day can ONLY be found on the Windows Mobile phone platform.
Score: 0
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