iPhone apps top 100,000 Less than six weeks after announcing that downloads from its iTunes App store had topped two billion, Apple on Wednesday let it be known that its online collection has now topped one hundred thousand apps. In a statement, Apple SVP of marketing Phil Schiller tossed a not-so-subtle jab at Cupertino's Palm Prē and Android …
My personal belief at this point is that the 100K App milestone is the point when Apple should shift 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
100 000 applications? For a phone?
Half of the free ones seem to be "Lite" (should that be light?) versions and three quarters of the paid ones are clones of each other.
Four Fifths of the remaining fifth of the paid applications are clones of the remaining half of the free ones. Duuuhhhhhhh my head
99.9% of that total are alot like iTunes Store and the App Store in regards to finding an app we want, about as useful as Helen Keller in a barfight. IE, you could use her as a melee weapon but she wouldn't really go River Tan on their asses....
Hold up, I just came up with a new franchise... there's an app for that.
oh come on. this is a stupid pissing context..the iPhone has now been out for years and had time to build that library up.... the Android platform is playing a very quick catchup game..and the Pre has only just started.
its a long marathon...and personally I'd rather have fewer but better apps than a tonne of crappy ones (cough, Apple Store, cough)
It is rather amusing with the amount of irony in these comments. With regards to the devices themselves, if they aren't exemplary of quality over quantity then I don't know what is. Yet most people on Reg moan that they don't do 'this' or 'that'. Also there is this constant whining that Apple are too restrictive. Yeh, thanks for the laugh.
However, I agree that most apps on the app store aren't too great unfortunately. But props to Apple for giving the chance for consumers to decide; it's not their fault that you're lazy.
Really, if you lot are going to start bitching and moaning about quality over quantity then Reg need to start banning comments that include 'there's an app for that' quips and 'paris, because there isn't an app for her' or some other bollocks relating your choice of avatar to the nonsense you just posted.
So the %age of apps developed for the sheer goodwill and love of it is higher in a community writing for an open source platform than people writing for a closed platform with a much higher fool-and-his-money ratio. I'm betting on Android for the future.
Anyone with Android, btw, try the relatively new, excellent and well-supported yet totally free Handcent SMS client, it's a revelation!
If this doesn't prove the sheer volume of dross on the app store, nothing will.
Come on, there aren't 100,000 application requirements for a phone! Where am I is useful. So is a map (which the iPhone gets straight from google, so just an http interface there). And locating local things, oh google again or yell.co.uk.
How many of these apps are either just a front end for, or could be replaced with a RSS feed? An RSS enabled phone and/or the ability to use a google search would wipe out most of them.
>> "and about 5 are really useful.. the rest is distilled male-type bovine byproduct..."
You meant to say, "Pure Bullshit"?
Like the 500 Flashlight apps and 2000 fart apps, and oh yeah, all the beer drinking apps.... And how long would it take someone to search through 100,000 applications?? Longer than I care to imagine.
Android is catching up with quality and cutting edge application day by day. Should be fun to see what all the talented developers come up with for Android.
the App store's got nothing to do with it. Certain people will buy an iPhone, certain people will waste their money downloading utter dross from the App store.
The fact that there are 100,000 apps on the store, only goes to prove that there's one born every minute.
a major differentiator for millions of Apple shareholders and App store authors around the world.
There I fixed that.
Other people will buy an Android, Palm or Windows Mobile and get some work done.
Where's the coloured crayons icon?
Guess what I downloaded (and WORKS!) the other day for my G1? A METAL DETECTOR application. Seriously. I guess it uses the compass chip to sense ferromagnetic magic or something, and in fairness you need a pretty big lump of metal, and you need to calibrate it for each place - but still, as a free and innovative show-off toy it's excellent!
Sorry if I come across as a bit fanboyish, but I do like the Android platform, it seems the most progressive of all the smartphones I've owned, and I've owned a lot!
Agree ... a few months ago I came to the conclusion that the iPhone had reached win95 status ... there may be better alternatives ... but its "good enough" and you can get the apps to run on it.
At the time of win95 I was in the OS/2 camp and considered that on technical grounds as an OS it was far superior to win95 ... however, around that time I spent 3 years in Silicon Valley and walking into somewhere like Fry's and seeing the 4 or 5 aisles of win95 software and the half shelf (if you were lucky) of OS/2 stuff meant I soon took the steps to dual booting win95 and then dropping OS/2 completely.
Apple fanbois might not like it but for me the iPhone is the win95 of smartphones ... not technically the best but got the apps ... remember - feel the width not the quality!
Having had a shufti through the offerings on the Register download service, it looks as if nobody has a monopoly on over-duplicated and mostly crap apps.
Or indeed have a look at the Nokia Ovi store for a truly appalling vista.
Pot calling the kettle black doesn't make either any less so...
Surely the point is that the Android Market/Pre store/Ovi etc wouldn't exist if the App Store hadn't proved such a runaway success.
Apple showed how to create a software ecosystem which users could understand and gave developers a sensible route to market. I've bought apps for my previous 3 smart phones (two PalmOS Treos and an SE p910), but they were frequently expensive, finding them wasn't easy, and I suspect that loads of people with capable smart phones (particularly Symbian) effectively used them as feature phones. If they knew they could install 3rd-party apps they probably hadn't figured out how to find, buy and install them.
Yes, there's a lot of dross in the app store. There's also a lot of interesting and useful stuff, much of it either free or very cheap. Most iPhone apps I've installed have been less than £3 - Symbian stuff used to cost a whole load more. Just a few examples:
Picoli/CameraBag (photo processing)
iBlogger (blogging client)
Stanza (ebook reader)
IM+ (multi-protocol IM)
TapForms (database)
BeatMaker (sampler/sequencer)
Guitar Toolkit (tuner/metronome/chord library)
Pocket Guitar/iKoto/Ocarina (musical instrument simulations)
Bloom (interactive ambient music generator co-written by Eno)
Shazam (identifies tunes)
QuickOffice (word processing/spreadsheet/file viewer)
Skype (VOIP)
Ocado (shopping)
What happened to the "competition is healthy" observations?
Regardless of the content, it's good that Apple's making a noise, and it's good that they made the iPhone in the first place, otherwise would we have Android and Pre and everything that's yet to come, taking the mobile as a portable computing device seriously, and digital store distribution seriously?
I remember not so long ago (and it still goes on) that the only way to get mobile games, in J2ME, Brew, or whatever-your-flavour, was through portals which charged a fucking fortune!
Cheer up.
grab the proper star trek tri corder, you will bloody love it.
Yeah Android can do all the things listed by bygjohn using FREE apps off the marketplace (except Bloom, however I'm sure someone will get round to knocking at least a conversion out soon enough).
The you get onto stuff like proxoid which I don't think has an Apple equivalent (use your phones net access from your PC/laptop without having to get dodgy root permissions or anything contract breaking).
Oh and we've been playing Doom and it's sequels on it for ages.
The most recent update has now convinced me I can sing it's praises and it probably wont freeze up just when I go to show it off :D
Basically, if you read the Reg, you should be trying one out. Even if you previously loved the fruit vendors wares.
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