“Google announced on Wednesday that its Google Play store for Android has seen 25 billion downloads to date, and a total of 675,000 applications are now available,” Sam Oliver reports for AppleInsider.
“The announcement, made on the company’s official Android blog, comes a few weeks after Apple provided its own update on the success of the iOS App Store. At the iPhone 5 media event, Apple revealed that the App Store had more than 700,000 applications, with 250,000 of those written specifically for the iPad,” Oliver reports. “As for the total number of application downloads, Apple’s App Store reached the 25 billion mark in early March, or nearly 7 months before Google gave its own update on Wednesday. Apple’s App Store launched three months before Google Play, then known as the Android Market, in 2008.”
Oliver reports, “Estimates have shown that Apple’s App Store dominates in terms of paid applications. One study released last year found that Apple’s iOS platform took in about 90 percent of all dollars spent on applications for mobile devices.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We pity those who settle for inferior derivative wares, a substandard experience, and a third-rate ecosystem when obviously superior options are blatantly and readily available.
And how many of those are copyright-infringing, blatant, ripoffs of genuine apps like the dozen or so versions of “iTunes” and “Angry Birds”?
Subtract those, and the malware/virus apps… And there are probably 300k apps total, with 280k of them free/ad supported.
Also substract all the Hello World apps
😀
So perhaps this explains why the share price of Google has climbed so much in the last month while the price of Apple has moved in an almost inverse relationship.
I’m not sure which stock market you’ve been watching, but on NASDAQ (where both AAPL and GOOG are traded), AAPL has outperformed GOOG over the past six months (not to mention one year, two years, five years, etc). If we exclude the drop since the iPhone announcement, then AAPL has outperformed GOOG over the past 3 months, as well as one month.
I assume that the same app has to have many versions on line for each Android device variation and the old OS level that they can’t upgrade past.
So, per device, how many applications do they really have? Can any one device use all “675,000 applications”?
ooh! Good point about FragmAndroid!
The apps show up by API rev. The majority being the API set from 2.3 gingerbread so anyone on 2.3 or higher will see the most apps from what I can tell.
Device specific fixes appear to just be rolled into a single build of the app. I’ve seen update logs that say things like “addressed an issue with motor Droid x to fix blah blah” on apps that I’ve updated on an HTC device.
Since the fragmentation is so bad I also see a lot of apps that just backport newer features to older versions of android so you can be on 2.3 but run the stock gallery app from ICS for instance.
As anything there is the good, the bad and the ugly with Google’s play store
Yeah, but how many of those are tablet optimized? that’s the real question!
I can’t find exact figures but i want to say I read something about 25,000 tablet optimized apps in google’s play store a few months ago. I doubt its changed much.
wow, 675,000 MALWARE milestones!!
I just don’t get it I rarely see anyone with an android phone. Everyone I know or work with has an iPhone or blackberry or a simple flip phone. Where are these android owners?
They’re stuck in their parents basements playing WoW an spewing Apple hate all day all over the Internet. They rarely see the light of day.
Now why ya got to spread hate on pandas? I don’t have a basement. And my grand daughter loves the pandas and my flying pony
Sent from my iPhone
Btw, also Mac user since 1984, and previous Apple employee. Loved em then, love em now.
What % of those 675,000 apps are paid apps?
Here’s my question….is Google including song downloads? Last I checked, their MP3 store was also called “Google Play.” I constantly see free downloads (or super cheap, like $2.99 for an album) of music from there listed on “daily deal” sites….if included, that’s extremely misleading.
So they’re probably including it. It IS Google, after all…