Apps, apps, apps! With Google’s recent announcement that the Android Market has reached 38,000 applications, I decided to find out how many applications are in each of the major smartphone app stores. Remember that these figures are only for the number of applications in the official application store and do not include the total number of applications for a platform.
With no surprise, Apple leads the count with just shy of 160,000 applications at last count, while the aforementioned Android Market has 38,000. Claming a distant third in this size-only contest is Blackberry’s App World, which has 6531. Symbian is fourth with just over 3400 apps while following behind in fifth is the Palm App Catalog with 2169 applications. Falling dead last is Windows Marketplace For Mobile, with only 840 approved applications. For posterity sakes, the morbid Palm OS App Store has 2393 applications.
If the non-approved applications were to be included, my best estimate is that Apple would still be leading, with Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian vying for second place, and the rest of the field falling well back. It will be interesting to see if Apple can maintain this gargantuan lead as Android’s growth has been absolutely torrid. Also, will the paltry number of 840 increase to several thousand with the looming Windows Phone 7 launch later this year? Only time will tell!
Please note that for the Microsoft, Blackberry and Palm OS figures, I used a calculator to add up the total as they each give a break down of how many applications are in each genre, but not the total amount of approved applications. Also, as these stats are not officially given by the various companies, they are what I have found to be the most reliable count.
Special thanks to Mr. X, Mikee4fun, and psycho_maniac for helping with this post. Image from thewebsquad.com.
© 2010, BigDiesel07. All rights reserved.


Its ridiculously sad that the App Store has well over 150,000 apps for only 3 devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad). This platform has only been out for what…maybe 2 years?! The Windows Mobile platform has been around since 2000 and doesn’t even have 1,000 apps? What’s up with that? I know WM is based on more business type users but seriously, Microsoft is slacking hardcore. Better hope they make some sort of revolution with Windows Phone 7 Series or its game over.
i could be wrong but i think that if you add up all of the misc. cab files for mods (task bars, sliders, clocks, etc) wm will far exceed iphone apps.
@QMeli907 –
Remember that those figures are for the official app store, not the total amount of applications ever made for each platform OS. I understand what you are saying though
Well WM prolly has the most apps all in all but are scattered around the internet. Apple on the other hand introduced an organized and a 1 stop shop for available apps in their app store(non appstore apps are available at cydia and others). A lot saw the advantage of this app store system that is why the rest of them followed. That’s including a safe app to install and a strict apporval system. We recently had a virus report on WM. IDK which one to blame for that but it is apparently can be downloaded at the market place. Outside the appstore apps for WM can also make someone’s device unstable. Android app store does not have a strict approval system that is why your little kids can simply download and install a free porn app. Any which way, still good to see a good competition goin on there.
A bunch of apps on the iphone are novelty apps right? WM apps are all pretty useful. With iphone, we get stuff like the farting app. Quality over quantity, guys. Although I’m sure the App Store still has more useful apps than WM, but I bet its not as bad as it seems! =D
I agree with Diesel and Jethro… Winmo probably has the most apps if you count the cabs that aren’t in the marketplace. I mean… basing Winmo’s app selection on the marketplace is like basing the extent of our medical knowledge off of the OTC medicines at a CVS store…
Anyhoo, while some apps on Winmo may make the phone unstable, it is at least easily fixable. All you have to do is back up the phone beforehand and restore your latest configuration.
Additionally, like Brokensparrow said, many of the apps in Apple’s app store are completely and utterlly useless! I haven’t seen a single app on the iphone (in commercials, youtube vids, or anything else) that actually caught my attention.
When it comes down to it, Winmo is simply the best OS out there IMO.
i have to agree with sparrow, im tired of seeing 7 different farting apps & 15 different lighter apps
Even though the iphone may have alot of useless apps it shows developer support for that platform compared to the others and thats what makes apple almost impossible to de-throne right now. My 6700apache’s, 6800mogul’s, diamond, tp1, and current tp2 have always been able to do so many different things the iphones wish they could do but whats the point if the developers arent showing their support. And yes I also believe in quality over quantity but when it comes to making money developers are gonna go with the platform that has the majority users aka iphone or even nintendo with their wii. With wm7 right around the corner, it could possibly be the best mobile os ever created, who knows, but if no one buys it then the developers wont support it and it will simply die.
@QMeli907 –
But you do have to realize that the Windows Mobile Marketplace is rather new, but that doesn’t mean that there are no apps for it, they just aren’t available though marketplace. It even says in the article
“If the non-approved applications were to be included, my best estimate is that Apple would still be leading, with Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian vying for second place,”
Apple would still probably have more apps but by a margin that you could attribute to WM being a business platform.
[...] 1 votes vote How Many Apps In That App Store? Apps, apps, apps! With Google's recent announcement that the Android Market has reached [...]
WinMo has the most apps with the highest quality in terms of function, Apple has the most approved apps with the highest quality in terms of visual aesthetics. Those are pretty much facts.. Ill take the more useful but less polished Wm apps, since Wm Sense is more polished and better looking than any homescreen ever made for any os ever lol…
And Danger not Apple is the company that started the first appstore as we know it..
if you count all the apps that are available for Windows Mobile – it will beat iPhone by a long shot, my guesstimate are in the tens of millions
10s of millions?? get out of here man… goto a place like freewarepocketpc or 1800pocketpc and start counting… sure thats not all of the apps, but itd be a decent portion and i bet theres not even 10,000 on those repository sites.. add in we’ll say 10,000 more apps of randomly created user apps.. your upto around 20,000 now… far cry from tens of millions… and lets not forget all the winmo apps that dont work on every device and our specific.. Andrioid, it just matter you have compatible vers of Android… iPhone, as long as its an iPhone, iTouch or iPad they all work
@boredandtattooed –
It would be interesting to see an estimate of the applications in each of the platforms, in the official app stores plus those outside of the official stores. I have seen one estimate of the WinMo apps in the seven figures.
It would also be useful to see the differentiation between OS apps. I own an iPod Touch and a Windows phone. These are my differentiation apps:
iPod Touch:
Crash Kart
Monkey Ball
Yelp
iPod (best MP3 player)
Windows Phone:
Tom-Tom GPS
iGo (GPS)
XDA Wifi Sharing
Torrent app
Core Player (view Divx and Xvid)
Excel (best spreadsheet)
Its sad users get so caught up in the app hype especially when prolly only a handful of them are used on a regular basis.
I actually started a thread on this topic awhile back and the jist of it all was that there are alot of apps out there for WM devices, just not all in one place. Marketplace needs to do something to try and convince the masses that it’s a great place to “market” their apps. The same way Apple did with it’s app store. Also, from some reports that have come out, with WM7, they are clamping down and heavily controlling the design content for apps. So much so that Mozilla has stopped development of it’s mobile browser for the WM arena. They’re doing it for all the other platforms but have stopped developing for WM. I think that says alot for the future of the OS and it ain’t good.
When it comes down to it, Apple has created the best application store on the market.
Sure there are crazy apps, like the aforementioned “fart apps”, but thats all in the mixture of 160,000 apps. If there are around 160,000 apps, I’d wager to say there are at least over 50,000 very useful apps that compete for the elite of WM apps.
I’m not saying that all WM applications are terrible. They just haven’t developed a place to easily access them, and until they do, they will be at a loss in the market for apps when weighed against Android and iPhone OS’s.
@pesok
There is no way there are tens of millions of apps for Windows Mobile. That’s just unreal. Maybe close to one million, but not any more. And if so, there is no clear cut way to find them, without scavenging the internet looking for them. With one search, Apple has made all of it’s apps easily accessible to a wealth of users.
@Bulldog46208
There are also great GPS apps for the iPhone. Android has the best GPS in Google Maps on the market today, and it comes shipped FREE with a Motorola Droid. No paying $100 for an application, when it comes free out of the box on Android phones. Also, an iPod touch is not meant to be a comparison to mobile phones such as the ones mentioned in the article.
The problem with MS is not MS, it’s the haters out on the market like Mozilla. It seems manufacturers and or developers will do anything to shun MS at any cost. Look at what linksys and Hp (for example) did to MS when Vista hit the market. Those 2 manufacturers refused to make updated drivers for the OS and Linksys refused to pay licensing royalties for 64 bit drivers and screwed MS big time.
Is this going to happen to MS again? Not likely because MS has become much smarter and learned from getting screwed on the whole Vista issue which was never an issue with the OS, but the manufacturers and developers.
As for apps? Let me tell you i bought a 32 gig ipod touch to use in my car because it seems BMW got paid well to only carry ipod interface on their radios. I have since purchase the 120 gig ipod and the touch ipod now sits and collects dust in my house for almost a year with tons of apps on it. That tells you how much fun the app store is to me and i play with my tp2 daily and have never gotten tired of it. Do i use apps? very few simply because i can do everything already and don’t need apps written by children. After a while you get tired of the junk apps out there and i would say that 80-90% of them are just that, junk.
WP7 is going to be incredible and there will always be MS haters and Lovers. If you want the best, you buy MS. If you want toys and subpar junk, you can have the rest.
also take into account that alot of these apps for each respective device are more than often garbage and even pointless, i would say they did a recount and broke down each into groups of productivity apps, games, entertainment and garbage. i personaly hate going to the android store and seeing 100′s of crap apps when i am just looking for one thing and i am sure that apple owners feel the same when they look for apps and so on. so i guess its all how you look at it. in the end who cares who has the most apps.
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