100,000 iPhone applications, Do we need so many?

Apple announced that they have more than 100,000 iPhone/iPod applications . This is phenomenal and one of the biggest mobile app store. Apple's iPhone has set a benchmark for smart phones. Today, Every Smartphone released in the market is compared with iPhone. I wonder where are the Nokia’s and Motorola who were the leaders in the mobile handset market.

Here is what apple has to say about the app store:

“The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”

“The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve,” said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. “With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers.”

Coming back to the number of iPhone applications. I still wonder if you need so many apps for a mobile. I guess most of the iPhone applications are useless except for the few of them. I myself have installed bunch of them and don’t see a need to install more than few apps. According to AppsFire, an app tracking and sharing service, majority of the applications are unused. The usage of apps ranked at #5 is 51.5% and #1000 is only 1.76 percent users. So there is huge difference between top apps and bottom numbered apps. The usage/installs of apps that are ranked 2000-10000 are negligible. I guess by charging developers to put their apps on app store, apple is still making money.

So far none of the smart phones are a good competitor to iPhone. Verizon is aggressively pushing more number of smart phones into their market. Motorola’s droid looks promising. The reviews have been good so far. It’s built on top of Android 2.0. Google’s Android app store has around 10,000 applications. Sure, not a match to iPhone’s app store. Only time will tell if iPhone will have a real competitor. Till then, enjoy using iPhone and the apps.