Looks like the Android Market continues to grow and the number of apps added is increasing pretty quickly, Distimo are reporting that the Market now plays host to over 400,000 apps. When they broke down the numbers they found that 2/3 of those apps are ‘Free’ apps, which from my experience I would take to be ad supported,leaving the remaining 1/3 as being paid apps.
They also found some other interesting stats such as there are 100,000 app developers registered who on average publish 4.1 apps each, which is slightly down from the 5 apps on average they posted a year ago. With the addition of Google Music to the Market place in the US and Bands able to upload their own music after paying a $25 fee, i`m wondering if this counts them as developers as it`s essentially the same sign up process.
The graph above shows the time it took both Android and iOS to reach the 400,000 mark, however the Apple App store does have over 500,000 so there is a ways to go before they reach parity in regards to the total number of apps available in their respective markets. This does not mean that there is only this many apps available for Android as Android has multiple companies supplying their own markets, some of which provide apps which aren`t suitable for the Android market, such as emulators, betting applications or one of my favourite apps Wifi Kill, you can even find APK`s around just on companies websites to side load onto your Android device.
The trend to release Android Apps first or at the same time as iOS devices is growing and as Android gains more market share it would be nice to see app developers doing simultaneous releases of their apps for both platforms. It would certainly be nice to not see the title ‘…now available for Android’ for an app that has been available on other platforms for a while, in
