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Watch nearly any newer Apple event and you'll undoubtedly see someone talk about the sheer number of available apps on the App Store. Most of the time they mean the iOS App Store and not the Mac App Store. There was a time when the total number of available apps on any given App Store was truly meaningful and a good indication of how viable the surrounding ecosystem was if you were either a developer or a consumer looking to buy into a given system. With hundreds of thousands of available apps on the App Store though, it's all just a meaningless number that doesn't indicate anything, really.

Finding any given app is close to impossible unless you have either a spot of luck or know just the right key words to search for. With time people have learned to trick the system and get their apps higher and higher up in the rankings. You know the kind, I'm sure. The kind you stumble across as you go looking for with the most mundane search term, like "GTD" or "todo list". Ever try sifting through that huge pile of alternative apps, many of which have similar icons, descriptions and screenshots?

And then there is the shovelware. Any time you have a very successful software platform, you will get lots and lots of shovelware. It was true for the Nintendo Entertainment System, it was true for the Sony Playstation, it was true for Microsoft Windows, and it is very much true for Apple's iOS App Store! Adding to the above mentioned mess of unfindability, despite semi-valiant attempts by Apple to correct or improve the situation, it's just a pain in the neck to find good apps.

Personally I think there is something even lower than shovelware, as that at least indicates that there is something of even a small value there. The real crap apps are the most useless, ill conceived and poorly executed blobs of data you can find this side of Jupiter. It looks like it behaves, most of the time, and there's a lot of them on the App Store! User Interface design is the polar opposite of what you find in these anti-gems of the ecosystem.

Naturally, there are a boat-load of good apps available, they're just buried underneath the digital equivalent of a thick layer of feces. You really need a tricorder to find them!

It's not about who has the most apps anymore, and it hasn't been for a while either. The numbers that do mean something, even now and today, is how many quality apps are available, and how many are adapted to take full advantage of a given form factor, like a tablet computer. That's where it's at, laddie!

So please, can we stop talking about how many apps there are on any given app store in total?

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech writer from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on the British Tech Network, listen to him yap away on the British Tech iOS Show and read even more of his stuff on his site streakmachine.com or you can even follow him on twitter @streakmachine. (But you won't find him on Facebook!)

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Robert Falck

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