400,000 iOS Applications Now Available In The App Store | Hacker News Reader

400,000 iOS Applications Now Available In The App Store

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10 pointsxonder9 comments

This number is far too high to make any sense. Surely there is no point in, perhaps, 395,000 of those applications at all.

This just proves to show that this number is not going to have any meaning anymore.

Totally agree. The appstore is going to mirror the web. I'm wagering that Apple will increasingly have to focus on search/sort/filter tools rather than the winner-take-all browse approach they are using.

So it doesn't look much, if any, off from the projections that led to the prediction of app Store and Market numbers crossing in August (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/05/android-to-surpass-apples-a...). Though the number of approved apps not on in the Store, is that a reserve they can draw upon, or is there some reason they can't put them in the Store? If they can, they can bump their app number up at any moment and push off the projected crossing.

I would really love to know how big Apple's approval team is. It's mind boggling to think that at least one person personally test each and every one of those 400,000 apps.

And no malware. Thank Jeebus for the approval process!

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Regardless: the approval process doesn't stop malware. They don't have nearly enough time, effort, or manpower to sift through the source code or traces of every single app they approve. People have been hiding playful or malicious code in things as inconspicuous as Flashlight apps for years now.

Even if there are "rubbish" apps in the App store, the fact that they need to be approved to get there gives more "polished" feeling over the android market. But whether it is true or not is a matter of discussion.

Even if some xyz % of apps are rubbish, we can almost take it for granted that other app stores will also have similar kinda rubbish apps %.

There is easily as much crap in the AppStore as there is in the Android Market, trust me, I like to dig deep for games and I've downloaded (and purchased) some awful stuff.

However the App Store has enough polished apps that work on all their devices that they can easily bury crap apps so they can only be found in narrow searches.

Android has a really hard time doing this because the best games don't work, or barely work, on older devices, or they are messed up on large screens, or they crash on some phone models, etc, etc.

So, on Android, the simple, addictive Indy games live at the top because the big games are sometimes providing a frustrating, rather than fun, gaming experience.

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