Comments on: Apple App Store has over 500,000 apps

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:10:00 +0000

I have never installed Angry Birds and don’t even have a Twitter account; I might have been generalizing, but I wasn’t expressing my own personal app preferences. I also said “a few dozen,” not literally twelve apps. You’ve reduced my argument ad absurdum but you haven’t said much to refute it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:11:00 +0000

Have you considered not everyone is like you? I have way more than a dozen apps which are very relevant and use regularly, that’s on top of the usuals.

May come as a surprise, but some people actually use their phones for stuff other than Twitter and Angry Birds.

As for old unsupported apps, once the developer stops paying the annual developer fee the apps are removed from the market and obviously not counted

By: Zachary Koterba

Zachary Koterba — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:55:00 +0000

A much more insightful article would have looked for the number of apps with X amount of downloads and/or ratings…

By: J. Williams

J. Williams — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:32:00 +0000

499,000 of them are worthless. When will they learn?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:10:00 +0000

I’m not convinced that this is actually a GOOD thing for anybody. There could be 15k flashlight apps but I only need one and couldn’t fit the other 14,999 choices on my phone if I wanted to. It seems like the volume of overlap with apps would make it more difficult for new developers with fresh ideas to take off, and more difficult for iOS users to actually find what they want. I don’t see Apple’s review process fixing that.

Saying that Google and Apple are “well ahead” of Microsoft just seems, well, petty at this point, considering how irrelevant all but a few dozen apps on ALL platforms are. People want WhatsApp, Netflix, Angry Birds, a good Twitter client, etc. Does Windows Phone not have them? If you want to put 60 apps on your phone, 500k will obviously include a few more keepers but I can’t imagine it really makes a practical difference.

Are these app counts cumulative? In other words, is there any “shelf life” for old apps whose developers have abandoned support, or are they kept around for inclusion in middle school locker room measuring contests?