Google’s Android Market passed the 100K app milestone Monday, as noted by a tweet from the Android Developer Team that nonchalantly announced, “One hundred thousand apps in Android Market.” While still far behind Apple’s App Store, the 100K milestone will likely be considered significant by many industry observers and analysts.
Apple’s App Store currently has some 284,000 apps available, according to third party site AppShopper.com. That breaks down to 266,374 iPhone apps and 37,290 iPad apps, with some overlap between the two categories. Indeed, Apple has either pulled or seen pulled by developers more than half as many apps as the Android Market boasts in total (more than 54,000 apps have been approved but are no longer available from Apple’s App Store).
Be that as it may, Google’s Android platform has gone a long way towards supplying the kind of foundation that was initially seen as such an advantage to Apple’s iOS platform (then the iPhone OS platform). With 100,000 apps to choose from, Android users aren’t going to have the same breadth of choice in any given category or app type, but most of those app types will be represented in one way or another.