The Android market has just joined the App Store in the prestigious 100K apps club. The news was confirmed by the Android Dev Team through their Twitter account this today so it's official this time.
Naturally you can't access all those apps on a single device due to carious restrictions concerning screen resolution, Android version and regional availability, but there will always be enough for you to choose from. And the numbers will only be going up from now on.
It took only three months for Android to go from 70 000 to 100 000 apps so that means that an average of 10 000 apps hit the shelves each month. And the share of the free ones among those is still hovering above the 60 percent mark, which is downright impressive. Even games like Angry Birds that come for a fee on other platforms (iOS and webOS) choose the free, add-supported way for their Android versions.
Still some would rightfully point that the Android Market has quite some way ahead to reach the Apple App store and its 300 000+ apps standard but at this point the differences gradually start to lose significance. We can't possibly imagine anyone being able to browse through 100 000 apps, let alone try each one of them.
As long as all the important stuff is there, most users won't care if there are 100K or a million apps. And the Google OS official repository has most things perfectly covered. Being a little light on 3D games is probably the only thing that renders it second best at this point.
Meanwhile, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace hit 1000 apps. This might be 100 times less than what the Android Market could offer you but let's not forget that the first WP7-powered smartphones have just started shipping. So, thumbs up!
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