Android hits 500K in theory, but has mass exits

New analysis from research2guidance on Friday showed Android passing 500,000 published apps but with signs that it had trouble sustaining apps as well as Apple's iOS App Store. Although it had hit the milestone as of September, a considerably smaller 319,161 apps were still live on the store. About 37 percent of apps have been voluntarily pulled or forcibly removed.

Apple only had about a 20 percent edge in lifetime published apps, at about 600,000, but only 24 percent of iOS titles had ever been pulled from the App Store, leaving a much higher 459,589 iPhone and iPad apps. Windows Phone was even lower at 13 percent but, at just a year old, was too young for many developers to have backed out.

The gap between Apple and Google is most likely due to inherent attitudes towards app submissions, researchers thought. Google's looser attitude led to more betas and demo versions but also app spam and, in rarer cases, malware that escaped Google's notice. An estimated 78 percent of the apps pulled were free, suggesting that many of the apps pulled were throwaway where paid developers cared more about end results.

Apple's stricter policy on app submissions meant higher quality titles that had a better chance of staying in the store, the analysts said. As such, while it wasn't necessarily growing faster, more developers cared about their output and led to a stronger overall app count.

By Electronista Staff