Google Says 700,000 Applications Available for Android | Hacker News Reader

Google Says 700,000 Applications Available for Android

businessweek.com

39 pointsmtgx29 comments

Reportedly around two thirds of mobile apps are never even downloaded.[1] And of those that are downloaded, a majority are used fewer than 10 times in total.[2] It's not the number of apps that matters, but the number of apps that people will actually use. In this regard, both the Android and iOS app ecosystem are still relatively immature and poised for considerable growth.

[1] http://gigaom.com/europe/app-store-infested-with-zombie-soft...

[2] http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/localytics_app_us...

That is the argument microsoft has been using for its windows phone apps. Quality over quantity

I bet that's a forced decision since their store is much smaller than the others. Everyone will try to find a way to proclaim that they're #1.

Eventually, they'll all have tons of apps, both good and bad. So, for me, #1 will go to the app store with the best app discovery service.

Likely. The other way to look at it is that many of the apps that are present in Windows phone app catalog are the ones where Microsoft convinced the app developer to write for the platform specifically. Now if that strategy is used then its obvious that Microsoft would have courted the top quality apps rather than going after poor quality ones.

I think the unfortunate truth is that everyone who has a big app store will continue to tout that because they're trying to grow their marketplace. "Our market is thriving, come join us!" is the message.

But with the exception of game churn, I think most people find core apps they want and stick to those. Probably the only other market as active as games is productivity apps, where people just love to churn.

Fortunately number of apps in the mobile space is still pretty well correlated with number of important apps, so the marketing is not fully uninformative.

Isn't that a loaded message anyway? More apps means more likelihood that your idea's been implemented or has benefited from some sort of first mover's advantage.

Eventually, discoverability will cause problems that probably makes the market look saturated when it isn't.

This is a good problem for consumers to have, though. And actually for vendors. It's a lot easier to carve a niche in a big and competitive marketplace than try help bootstraping a marketplace you don't control.

Lol reminds me of Google Plus - always talking about how many users they have but it's a ghost town.

Google Plus is the only place I can go to get intelligent conversation with people. You know, the kind that does not begin sentences with, "Lol."

"Reportedly around two thirds of mobile apps are never even downloaded."

False.

"At an event in San Francisco today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that 90% of the over 700k apps in the App Store are downloaded every month."

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/12/apples-cook-90-700k-a...

I'm not sure if Apple CEO Tim Cook is the most trust worthy source in this debate. There might be personal interests involved.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to find quality Android apps? I've saturated the primary sources of the Play store, AppBrain, and to an extent, Subreddits about Android. There are only so many times a person can open up the Play store and See Beautiful Widgets HD and Cut the Rope before the person gets disappointed.

This isn't meant to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious what the best ways are to discover Android apps.

I find most apps by searching.

Yeah, I really wish there was a way to cycle through new apps or recommended apps in a much more frequent fashion. Maybe with some kind of recommendation system from other people?

I love it whenever the have the cheap $0.10 or $0.25 sales, not just because the apps are cheap, but also because they present a dozen or so apps a lot of which I've never seen before...

I use Android Police's excellent suggestions that come out once every 2 weeks or so. They always have an interesting app or two. Besides that, suggestions on /r/android.

I second the Android Police suggestion. They really do a great job highlighting good android apps.

For anyone curious, here is a recent app roundup they did. http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/10/04/51-best-and-2-wtf-ne...

No idea, but whilst I am here... I have fallen in love with this timer app: http://www.opoloo.com/timer

It's transformed my cooking as now I no longer burn my pizzas.

I half kid. It is beautiful, and I would love to find other incredibly functional, well-thought out, complete and gorgeous apps.

As to the comment above about it being quality over quantity... no, it's both, quality and quantity. The long tail should be served, but I want the quality to exist at the tallest part of that histogram.

While I agree that's a beautiful app, I fail to see how it would prevent you from burning pizzas, where regular timers would fail. While I'm replying, I may as well point out Ovo[1], the free rival.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ilumbo.ovo...

I tended not to use the more ugly timers... and yes, I truly did burn my pizzas.

Ovo is much more pleasant to use than Opoloo's Timer, yo!

You don't find good e-books on Amazon by browsing. Pretty much everything you find is crap. "Anyone can be an author" is great until everyone is. Then it sucks. Apps are exactly the same; almost everything is crap. Perhaps one in a thousand apps is worth a buyer's time, just to read the description.

So you need a gatekeeper. But not just one -- you need a number of them.

In the physical book world these are publishers. There are many good and bad effects to publishers, but one of the good effects is that they screen out huge amounts of crap before it's ever inflicted on the public.

I don't buy e-books by using the Kindle store. I go through physical book listing only, presuming that if it's made it past a publisher, it might be worth my time to look at. After I find something interesting, I'll flip over to the digital version if that's what I'm interested in.

To solve the app store problem there needs to be more than one store. There needs to be a lot of stores. These can be _within_ Google's or Apple's store.

Professional publishers can partner with selected application vendors, roughly "endorsing" apps. Publishers can join together to form groups, and groups can create storefronts.

As a buyer I can then pick and choose from storefronts/publishing groups that organize and choose books that are appropriate for me.

App sellers will have to give up some of their (non-existent, because nobody knows the app is there) revenue to the publishers in exchange for the service.

As long as the buyer and can shift and select from between publishing groups, and the base provider (like Google) makes it _tough_ to become a publisher or group, it stands a chance.

One more thing -- as long as reviewers keep mentioning 1,000,000 apps available as a _good_ thing, it's hard to make the situation better.

Imagine logging on to Steam, and finding a million games, 99.9% of which are crap. And then buried somewhere, in all of that crap, are a few underfunded gems, whose authors are desperately trying to make it work. And then they get cloned.

I usually start with an idea of what I am looking for. When I find something interesting, I look what other users that installed this app also installed. That way I sometimes find something.

I do not know about quality, but you can use appannie.com to find popular and/or money making apps.

"Does anyone have suggestions on how to find quality Android apps?"

I'm using http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine .

Appstore discovery is currently very much the directory that altavista and yahoo used to be, but good old Google works just fine.

One method I used was to scour code.google.com and github for android projects. Many free apps were more useful than similar non-free apps. Some authors had both free and non-free apps. Also it gave a small hint of trustability.

I like to G+ recommends by people in my circles.

I have not found any very good method though.

As a google shareholder i'd love to see the fee droping to a sane rate (say 10%? That's not enough? Ok, 20%?). Because that would be a __huge__ plus for the android platform IMO.

Why?

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