New Android Market Stats Out, Over 200k Apps Available

I believe AndroLib's download numbers represent the high end. They seem to use the download quantity bracket tags Google posts for each app on the Android Market. These tags place each app into a download bracket such as "1000-5000 downloads" for example, but AndroLib seems to use the high end of the bracket in their interpolation of total and by sub-category Android Market downloads. In this example it would seem they use the 5000 figure.

Given that there is probably some lag in Google's application of bracket tags to apps, many apps' actual downloads may exceed the number of downloads they had when they were last bracketed. This would cause most apps' actual downloads to land in the higher end of their bracket. So the numbers AndroLib are using are probably not too far off. But, overall they seem to overstate the downloads.

App store (apple) approaching 400,000 so you are out by 100,000 referring to Apple.

Hello, thanks for reporting this... 200,000 Android apps, is this a good thing?

I am Todd R. Levy and my company, BloomWorlds, is developing Android’s family friendly app store, to help Android parents discover safe, secure, and appropriate apps for their children by utilization our vetted submission process.

We are going to filter out the spam apps, sexy girl wall, and other inappropriate content. This way Android users will be about to discover and download only the highest quality apps.

Whether there are 100,000, 200,000 or 1 million apps is meaningless while Google lets any junk, spam, malware, "hello world" or test app etc into the Android Marketplace. Also, "apps" in the Android Marketplace include wallpapers, widgets, soundboards and ringtones making the total of actual apps far less.

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