With a Few Mobile Apps Popular, the Rest Are Just Noise

Mobile apps on Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace have shown impressive growth in the past 10 months and recently passed 30,000 offerings. "Big deal," wrote one commenter on a technology news site. "Apple has what, half a million?"

Not quite. Apple's App Store boasts more than 425,000 offerings as the "ultimate source for mobile apps." The half-million mark is likely not far off, and unless it eventually draws a sensible line, one million apps in the not-too-distant future is possible.

Floodgates Are Open

A NewsFactor reader pointed out that a web site devoted to Android apps, AndroLib, has tracked 312,179 apps in Google's Android Market, of which 84.5 percent were practical applications and 15.5 percent were games. The Ovi Store for Nokia phones had 83,579 apps at the beginning of the year, and the App World for BlackBerrys had 37,176, according to a report by Distimo, while the webOS App Catalog for Pre phones had just 7,062.

Technology is all about high numbers: The more RAM, storage space, megapixels or megabits per second, the better. So of course six-figure app counts are impressive.

But all this data made me wonder: Is an enormous wealth of available apps really a good thing, or are consumers better off with a more limited selection? If you were buying a new car or TV and had tens of thousands of new models to choose from, could you really be sure you were getting the product that is right for you?

So I did some research on my iPad, looking for apps to learn Spanish and found 602 relevant apps for iPhones and 286 for the iPad, and they can be sorted by release date, relevance or user reviews. Then I got spiritual and looked up apps related to the Bible. There are 1,170 for the iPad and 2,706 for the iPhone. A "sports scores" search turned up 1,907 possibilities, though narrowing it down to Yankees scores produced a more manageable nine.

Apple's App Genius can help with suggestions based on your history, as can Hello Chair's paid app, Explor (formerly Appsaurus). But unless you have hours to spend wading through hundreds of apps and narrowing your search to the most popular suggestions, you will most likely buy one of the first few dozen apps that comes up in a search, just as most people probably don't get past the first few pages of Google search results.

So if the category of app you are looking for has 600 matches and you pick one of maybe 50 you've viewed, what good did it do you for the App Store to have those other 550?

"At a point I believe we passed some time ago, the number of available apps stops being beneficial and simply becomes a nuisance," said analyst Charles King of Pund-IT. He noted that a recent study by Nielsen Smartphone Analytics found that the top 50 most popular apps -- including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- on the Android Market made up 60 percent of the time that surveyed Android phone owners used apps.

"From a market/competition vantage point, that means that apps can be a sweet deal for top-end developers but a thicket of anonymity for most everyone else," he said. "The bigger the forest becomes, the harder it is to discern individual trees."

'The More The Merrier'

Raphi Salem of New York-based Salem Global, a search-engine-optimization firm, noted that the reason the number of apps is growing so steadily is that major retailers, banks, news organizations, and other companies are increasingly getting into the game by building apps to take smartphone users to their sites to buy products, pay bills, or manage their accounts.

"For Apple or Microsoft, their business is to make the platform more available, so if you are looking for an app to fold your laundry for you, you can find it," Salem said. "I don't think there is a problem with clutter because the cream rises to the top. The more the merrier for Apple, and the more the merrier for the consumer."

But with smartphone adoption on the rise -- a Pew Internet survey last week found the U.S. market has grown 53 percent to 78.5 million subscribers in the past year, and more than 40 percent of U.S. consumers 15 and older have one -- the app market on all platforms is sure to skyrocket even more.

That could create some problems with your favorite apps as their developers, who know that differentiation is key, go where the money is.

"We are quickly reaching a point where consumers are likely to feel inundated by the sheer volume of available apps," said Jeff Burstein, a Dallas-based developer whose latest project is IQ4U, a wait and reservation management system. "To that, factor in an inevitable future that will see apps that are no longer supported by their developers and those that have been abandoned long ago. Given this scenario, it is easy to see a time when an OS may tout that they have a lower number of supported apps than their competition."