Common sense be damned; let the app counting debate carry on.
There are conflicting reports that Apple has passed the 300,000 app milemarker for apps in its App Store. Has it? Close, but not quite. Though several tech blogs are reporting 300,000 apps in the App Store — or more — an unnamed Apple spokesperson has told Boy Genius Report that the store is at “over 280,000.”
VentureBeat (or MacNN, depending on who you believe broke the news first) originally reported that Apple had surpassed the 300,000 mark, but, according to Fortune, the blogs were reporting unreliable data from “Mobclix, an ad exchange network that knows on which apps its ads have appeared, but not whether those apps are still available for download.” Fortune then said the number was hovering at 278,000, taking into account the roughly 55,000 inactive apps.
Confused yet? It goes on. VentureBeat then kinda conceded the facts and added that “Neither 148apps or AppShopper — other firms providing metrics — have “found an efficient way to count apps that are released overseas but not in the U.S. App Store.” And MacNN’s headline now reads: “Apple nears 300,000 available iOS apps” with the sub headline: “App Store unofficially passes 300,000 titles.” (Emphasis mine.)
What?
Anyway, Apple is supposedly launching 1,000 new apps per day, with 206,000 of them costing money, and just under 94,000 are free downloads.
With these kinds of numbers (reliable or not; who knows?), it’ll only get harder to make a choice about which apps to download and which to ignore. Maybe it’s time to cut that number down into something digestible, and focus on quality over quantity.