Top stories

Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Apple=100,000 iPhone Apps, Microsoft=246 Windows Mobile Apps

iphone_apps

UPDATE: Oops. Sorry for the embarrassing headline typo. Fixed.

Leaping way, way ahead of competitors, Apple has approved more than 100,000 apps for the App Store, according to App Shopper, an app tracking site.

By contrast, there’s 246 apps for Windows Mobile, which has been around for six years, and about 96 apps for the Palm Pre (see Palm’s list of WebOS applications). Google’s Android,which is probably the iPhone’s strongest competitor, has about 10,000 apps, according to recent estimates. Google has yet to release official figures.

Apple in August said there were 65,000 apps. It took just another 10 weeks to approve more than 35,000 apps. (Apple has approved more than 100K apps, but the number actually available for download is slightly lower: about 93,000)

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

12 comments

    It will be interesting to see if in-app purchasing does anything to pare this number down.

    Please keep us informed as usual.

    FYI: 6 zeros (in headline) = 1 million.

    Is it just me or is the title a typo? I was amazed when I read 1 Million apps!

    Looks like they fixed it. I had the same reaction initially, Nick.

    … but 95% of these apps are useless…

    Another correction is in order. Palm has 257 apps available in its app catalog on the Pre. The website dpes nlot list all the apps.

    Not that it changes the point you are making :-)

    The Palm Pre gets a bad rap in this article. Although still less than 1% of the apps available for the iPhone, the Pre actually has more than three times the 96 applications mentioned above.
    – splicer

    this is brilliant. go go apple. actually depending on how you want to slice it, windows mobile has been around in different forms for more than 10 years now. and yes google is doing very well. and to the whinger who thinks the apps are not useful, that is just your opinion – not a fact. if you negative people say it enough it wont become fact.

    Way to be misleading. You obviously already know that there are hundreds of thousands of Windows Mobile apps available, but you’d prefer to pick the paltry number in Microsoft’s Marketplace.

    In the time windows mobile has been around, there’s been a LOT more than 246 apps. Maybe in the app store, but what about those that are downloaded from people’s websites? I’m guessing there’s a lot more than what apple has to offer.

    And just like apple’s, most of them are useless junk. The only benefit Apple has (besides the iphone is better than most winmo phones) is that their apps haven’t been known to cause viruses or anything.

    are all 100,000 of apples apps fart apps or is that only 1000 of them?

    So, you gonna fix that misleading headline or what?

Add your comment

Name(Required)

Mail (required, but not published)

Website

Comment

Buy Inside Steve's Brain Buy from Amazon.com Buy from Barnes & Noble