App figures round up – Android now number two

We’re just doing some work on applications here at Business Mobile for a business partner, and part of that is to try and see the size of the market, so we went hunting  for figures on the number of applications in the wild. Unfortunately we just couldn’t find a single place with good figures that we trusted. So we decided that we’d have a go at doing it ourselves.

So here’s our first table on apps. It looks at all the major application platforms and the major operating systems and a few unexpected places that we think will see some growth.

As you can see Apple’s iOS is the top with around 250,000 applications. It the dominant player in the market and it’s still expanding fast, however we think growth will start to falter as developers realise that just building an app no longer offers a guaranteed ticket on the gravy train. Indeed launching an app is starting to be an expensive business. What we haven’t got figures for is the number of iPhone apps not on the Apple App store, we called them Non-Apple Apps on the graph and given it a question mark. The number of users “jailbreaking” their iPhones is increasing – it’s much easier to do it and Apple’s past threats of dis-communication don’t seem to be deterring iPhone users – hence the number of off-Apple App store apps will start to grow, and we think this will be a quite significant market in years to come.

Next up is Android, with 80,000 confirmed apps. It too is growing fast as developers realise that there’s a fast growing market. According to Google’s Director of Products for mobile, Hugo Barra who confirmed the 80,000 figure last week there are 180,000 registered Android developers so expect that figure to start to rocket soon. Additionally the numerous iPad-like Android devices expected in the next six months will give this a further kick. We’re also waiting for the Android DIY-app kit the Android App Inventor (http://www.bmob.co.uk/2010/07/12/google-makes-android-app-creation-simple/) to come out of Beta, which should push the number of apps up even further.

Next in line is GetJar with 73,866 apps. GetJar have started to be quite aggressive in their marketing and have been pushing themselves as the “second biggest app store”, unfortunately this is no longer true.  Hopefully the recent $11 million series B funding from Accel Partners and the publicity around their recent signing of James Mooney (ex-Microsoft Executive) to spearhead their UK sales should provoke some new apps.

Next up is Nokia Ovi which we estimate at around 50,000 apps. We think Ovi has had a significant boost from the recent Ovi App Wizard (http://appwizard.ovi.com/web_nokia/signIn.jsp), however the lack of any numbers on the market and the number of downloads etc from Nokia is worrying and it certainly doesn’t give developers confidence. Although the recent heavy marketing of Ovi on TV and in the press may allay these fears.

We’re now down to the stragglers.

Windows in all its forms and pre Windows Phone 7 has around 16,000 apps, but expect this to rise quickly as the WP7 launch happens in October/November.

Research In Motion confirmed last week on a twitter* that it now has more than 10,000 apps available “and growing” on its BlackBerry App World store. Hopefully the recent purchase of DataViz, and the new version of the App Store might add a few more, but they’re going to have to do a lot of work and a lot of publicity, otherwise they’re heading for a fall.

Lastly there’s Samsung Bada, we’re not sure, anyone know some figures that we could use???? Comments please? We think these figures are accurate but we’d like to know if you think otherwise.

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