Android Market: 150K Apps, Tripled in 9 Months
We’re sitting in live at Eric Schmidt’s keynote here at Mobile World Congress, and one of his first talking points was that Android market now has 150,000 apps in the market – it was somewhere around 50,000 just 9 months ago.
AppBrain released some early numbers based on their own statistic they keep back in late December, and the number looked a lot better as they’d estimated over 200,000. That may not be the case today, but 150,000 is still something to be proud of, I think.
Android has gained a lot of popularity with developers starting in 2010, the year that Android skyrocketed right past most of its competition.
Countless surveys and studies have been done that show developers are indifferent when it comes to developing for iPhone or Android, and nearly half of all developers actually prefer dealing with Android – everything from the flexibility in development to the freedom of the market.
And countless industry reports help developers reassure themselves in their plans to focus on Android just as much as they focus on iOS. Android became the world’s top selling platform in Q4 2010, beating the “king” Symbian, and they’re expected to be number one in market share in 2014.
Developers see just how many people are clinging to Android. The strategy Google’s employed doesn’t matter to us in this story, but the end result of that strategy shows them that there is finally real money to be had here.
2011 will only be greater as we see an entirely different Android market take off – one that’ll be geared for Honeycomb-based tablets. And the phone side of things will only keep growing.