While attracting traffic is not an issue, attracting developers seems to be

Sep 12, 2011 15:15 GMT  ·  By

Google launched the Chrome Web Store late last year. The idea was to create a hub for web applications, that live both online or in Google Chrome, where users could find things that might be useful to them.

At first, it seemed that the Web Store got off to a slow start, but even though it's not getting much attention, the simple fact that it's built into Google Chrome, which has well over 100 million users around the world, guarantees the site some traffic.

But how much traffic? According to data from ChromeOSApps.org, an independent site that keeps track of Chrome App stats, there should be close to 30 million Web Store users.

What's more, there are over 2.5 million app downloads in a week. That's a pretty impressive number, considering that the Web Store only houses a little over 6,000 apps for now.

Other app stores, i.e. mobile app stores like the Android Market or the Apple iTunes Appstore have hundreds of thousands of applications.

By comparison, the Web Store's 6,266 apps seems paltry. Considering that many are just wrappers for an existing website, the figure looks even worse.

Still, 30 million people have installed at least one application so there's clearly a lot of interest. There may be many reasons why developers are not flocking to the Web Store.

For one, making money from it seems like a lofty goal. While Google has debuted its in-app payments API, which make it easy for developers to integrate payments into their apps, for example for virtual items, they still rely on Google Checkout, a less than popular platform.

Chromebooks hold a promise for developers, Chrome OS users rely solely on the web and apps in the Web Store to perform any computing task. But they've sold in to few numbers for them to make a difference so far.