Android Market hits 200,000 apps?

Andriod is closing in on Apple be it apps or not, and their sales are proving it. Will 2011 be the year when Android will pull out in front? Who knows, only time will tell though.

I think if the iPhone does not go to Verizon this year, the Android will pull ahead. Apple HAS to get out from under the dismal AT&T, and expanding to T-Mobile instead of Verizon would be a HUGE mistake.

I know a butt load lot of people that jumped ship from their iPhone, and AT&T's over priced bandwidth capped plans and moved over to the Droid on Verizon or Evo on Sprint last year, and were surprised at how much they liked the Android phones over the iPhone. They will never go back.

And I know even more iPhone people who's contracts are up this year and are not going to renew it because they are sick of AT&T. And are seeing how cool the Android phones are from the people that jumped ship last year so they don't mind giving up the iPhone.

Apple better make the right move, and better do it this year or it will be too late. Android is a solid OS and most of the phones are amazing. If Apple waits too long people won't even care anymore, Android shows you don't NEED and iPhone to do what you like about the iPhone.

Originally posted by jookycola:

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I think if the iPhone does not go to Verizon this year, the Android will pull ahead.

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These are the droids I'm looking for.

Whether there are 100,000 or 1 million apps is meaningless while Google lets any junk, spam, malware, "hello world" or test app etc into the Android Marketplace. Also, "apps" in the Android Marketplace include wallpapers, widgets, soundboards and ringtones making the total of actual apps far less.

Recently, AppBrain posted that 45,000 of the 100,000 apps in the Android Marketplace were spam apps. That makes almost half of Android's "app" total spam!

John "DVD " Lech Johansen, the author of DoubleTwist the popular iTunes replacement for Android has this to say about the Android Marketplace:
"Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows. Unlike Apple’s App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps.... just a few examples of what’s wrong with the Android Market. ... 144 spam ringtone apps (which are clearly infringing copyright) are currently cluttering the top ranks of the Multimedia category... Developers and users are getting fed up and it’s time for Google to clean up the house."

And indication of the difference in quantity of quality apps between iOS and Android is no more evident than in the extremely important gaming category. Android is severely lacking in big name game titles from all of the largest mobile game publishers with only 16 games from Gameloft, Capcom Mobile, EA, Ngmoco, Pangea, Popcap and ID versus 309 from these publishers for Apple's iOS. Likewise, there are 38,000 games in total for iOS vs 13,000 for Android.

Although Popcap and EA have said they will start porting some games to Android soon, this disparity is not likely to change much with iOS developers making 50x the income ($1 billion) compared to Android ($21 million) over a similar timeframe according to Larva Labs and with piracy ranging from 50-97% on Android.

Raw numbers do not a complete picture paint.

-Mart