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(Image courtesy CNNMoney and 148Apps)
If you were paying attention to the Internet over the weekend, you might have heard the news that Apple has crossed the 300,000 app mark with the App Store. That would be good news -- if it was correct and had come from Apple themselves.
CNNMoney.com is reporting some confusion over the weekend regarding just how many apps are in Apple’s App Store. At the company’s music event on September 1, CEO Steve Jobs announced that there were “more than 250,000” such apps now available, and over the weekend it looked like another 50,000 had been added in just six weeks.
The problem is, that information didn’t come from Apple, but rather one of two websites -- either VentureBeat or MacNN (no one knows for sure who reported it first). In any event, the information turned out to be inaccurate.
“It turns out, VentureBeat and MacNN have made a rookie mistake,” explains Phillip Elmer-DeWitt in his Apple 2.0 blog. “They’re using a number from Mobclix, an ad exchange network that knows on which apps its ads have appeared, but not whether those apps are still available for download.”
As it turns out, the better way is to use data mined by two app tracking websites, 148app.biz and AppShopper.com (the latter of which is owned by the popular MacRumors.com). Both sites have programs which cull data from the App Store and compare that against the previous day’s data -- in that manner, they can determine how many apps are no longer active and remove them from the count.
Data collected from Sunday morning shows that there are 278,691 total active apps available on 148apps, while AppShopper increases the count just a bit to 279,975 -- getting close to 300,000, but not quite, unless you choose to count inactive apps (there are 55,508 reported by 148apps, or 55,282 by AppShopper).
In case you’re wondering how the nearly 280,000 active apps compares to Google’s Android Marketplace, AndroLib.com reports there are 113,123 such apps as of Sunday morning -- although more than 20,000 of those may be inactive, since Google’s earnings report last week claimed only 90,000 Android apps.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
