It hardly comes as a surprise that the App Store now plays host to over twenty-five thousand applications, but there’s something about hearing a concrete number that really makes you marvel at just how much of a success the App Store has been, despite having its share of flaws, like the still somewhat arbitrary rejection policies.
The figure of 25,000 is from the Web site 148Apps.com, which keeps a running count of all the new applications that are released on the App Store and features a list of the total number to date, broken down by categories. Apple itself hasn’t officially released any numbers in the recent past about how many applications there are on the App Store, going only so far as to state that they’d achieved over 500 million downloads on the App Store by mid-January 2009. Another site that tracks programs for the iPhone reported that the App Store hit 20,000 applications less than a month ago.
Add to that the findings of a February 25th report by the Global Intelligence Alliance that Windows Mobile—a mobile operating system that has been around for nine years—has a total of 20,000 third party applications to its name and it puts the App Store’s success into even clearer perspective.
Now that all the other major smart phone companies—including Blackberry, Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm—are nearing the launch of their own application stores, it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple can hold its own against the these new contenders. Going by their performance so far, though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them continue lagging behind Apple for a long time to come.
[Via MacDailyNews]