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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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"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.

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."

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.

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