As of the end of 2012, both the Apple App Store and Goole Play store claim more than 700,000 apps available. That is very impressive. Microsoft’s Windows Phone app store has more than 150,000, whereas the Blackberry app store has around the 100,000 mark too.
Famously, when Blackberry was announcing a milestone of apps in its app store, which was some paltry fraction of what was available from Apple, a journalist pointed out just that to which a RIM exec replied that while the number may have been small, does anyone really need 10,000 fart apps? Well, quite.
But does it really matter how many aps are in an app store?
Previously, we had asked the readers of TechCentral.ie how many apps they had downloaded on their smart phones. Those who downloaded up to 10 apps came in at 44%, 10-20 was 18% and 20+ was 39%. Now while the 20+ brigade at 39% is a fairly healthy proportion, the fact remains that from our sample, the majority had 20 or less and nearly half had 10 or less.
Now, I have a bunch of apps on my smart phone and would definitely be in the 20+ group, but I would say that I’d struggle to hit even the 80/20 rule with it. I’d say out of all of those apps, I use perhaps 5-6 apps regularly and the rest I doubt I have opened at all, bar that one time after installation.
In fact, if I look at my total app usage, I’d say that more than half of it is with apps that were part of the OS when I got it.
So, given that I’d regard myself as a slightly above average user in terms of the amount of stuff I do with the phone, does 100,000 apps make even the slightest difference to me? Not really. Does it matter to anyone? I’d say very few.
While it can certainly be argued that the sheer number of apps attests to the vibrancy of the app development scene for that environment, it does not in any way attest to the quality of the apps being produced.
For instance, one mobile operator here has a custom app, available through Android that is not fully supported by a handset that the operator initially had on an exclusive deal. That is pretty poor app development, but not unique by any means.
Despite the professed efforts of all mobile OS vendors, substandard or just poorly developed apps make it through all the time. This may be just poor design, or bad implementation, but the fact remains, most people have downloaded an app at some point to find that it either doesn’t do what it is supposed to, or it does it very badly.
Then of course, there’s the issue of access. I was using a common, and very famous, weather app until a recent update asked for access to call state. Now, the major capabilities of the app had not changed dramatically from the last iteration to this and so there was no discernible reason why it would need access to call states, and none was cited in the supporting documentation either. Needless to say, it is no longer installed on my phone.
So, should you make a purchasing decision of a handset based on the number of apps in its respective store? No, certainly not. If the numbers quoted at the start of this little rant are anything to go by, unless you are looking for something pretty rarefied, any of the top four should have what you are looking for. But will it do what it says on the tin? Well, probably, but don’t rely on sheer size, or longevity as any measure of quality either, none of them have so far proved, nor indeed even mildly troubled, infallible.
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