20,000 apps means less on Android than it does on iPhone

It’s being widely reported today that the Android Market now has at least 20,000 applications for sale - and while this is rightly heralded as a great sign for the platform, it also suffers from problems that iPhone apps don’t.

What’s the story?

Graphics from Androlib are being blogged about today, showing that the total number of apps now for sale on the Android have topped 20k. These kinds of figures are usually very difficult to access, because Google is pretty tight-lipped about that kind of thing. But Androlib is an independent source. It offers an alternate way to search and download Android applications, and it has been providing this service since DAY ONE. As such, it’s possibly the most accurate non-Google source out there… and it now claims to be hosting 20,025 Android apps.

Androlib has provided a host of informational graphics, of which the most interesting three follow:

What we think?

Let it not be said that I’m coming down hard on the Android here. The record shows that I’m a fan of the OS platform and the “smartphones for ALL!” ethos it represents. But there are issues with the very nature of the platform that means 20,000 apps on the Market just won’t make as much of a splash as 20,000 apps on iTunes. And those issues centre around device fragmentation.

The strength of the Android OS is that it allows any device maker to create a smartphone without having to worry about designing its own OS from scratch. Anyone can now place cutting edge smartphone software on their device. But the very proliferation of devices that comes with Android makes it much more difficult for developers to create apps for it. One Android app might be remarkably different to the next. Buttons will be in different places, screen sizes will be different, there may or not be a full QWERTY slide-out keyboard, etc. etc. etc.

Mobile games developer Gameloft recently announced it would only be developing apps for two kinds of Android phone - the Droid from Motorola and the Xperia from Sony Ericsson. And the reason for that is that they are both incredibly close in form and function to the iPhone:

So if you’ve got an iPhone, you can download any one of the billionty apps currently available from iTunes. But if you’ve got an Android (especially one of the raft of lower-end devices coming out next year) it’s likely that not all of the 20,000 apps on Market will run on your phone. This leads to a situation where there need to be MORE apps on Market than on iTunes in order for Android users to have an equal selection.

So then you have to ask the question, is this actually going to be a big problem?

The figures from Androlib show that user satisfaction is high with Android apps. But as the number of apps available increases even higher, the number of pointless or annoying applications will also increase. The actual number of useful, regularly downloaded and used apps on any store is going to pretty small at any point in time - or at least a hell of a lot smaller than the total number of available applications. Just because there is a smaller number of available apps for a given Android owner than a given iPhone owner doesn’t mean the guy with the Android won’t be able to do what he needs to do. But the fact remains that development for Android will remain more difficult and frustrating than for the iPhone.