Apple approves 1,400 iPhone apps in one day, mostly crap
By Will Park on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 3:32 PM PST In Announcements, Apple, Financial/Corporate News, iPhone, iPhone OS
The flood of iPhone apps hitting the AppStore doesn’t seem to be abating anytime soon. While the likes of the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) App World and webOS App Catalog add handfuls of apps at any one time, the AppStore last Friday saw an incredible surge of 1,394 iPhone apps going live. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), in a single day, approved more apps for the AppStore than there are apps in the entire App Catalog (many times more, in fact)!
To be fair, most of those iPhone apps were probably crap. We’ve seen too many free iPhone apps of marginal quality making their way into the AppStore to believe that more than a couple dozen of the nearly 1,400 newly-minted iPhone apps are anywhere near useful. But, that still doesn’t take away from the fact that the AppStore is still red-hot and still attracting mobile app developers in droves.
Now, if only Apple would be willing to be more transparent about their AppStore approval process…
[Via: MacRumors]
Why do people keep saying that the AppStore is attracting developers in droves?
More like there are the same several thousand developers who keep pumping out the same old crap, day after day.
Would love for someone to do an analysis of how many separate developers there actually are.
No matter what, the number would pale next to the number of Java and Win programmers in the world.
Same old story, the hypocrisy of Apple’s approval process. It’s very frustrating, I’m starting to believe their platform accommodates crap apps more than true quality apps. When will they learn?
For instance, the app “Stick It” (check it out: http://bit.ly/wYWEN) attempts to provide functionality that has been available on smartphones from the beginning – standby screen notifications. If Apple would allow the simple and harmless task of updating the phone’s wallpaper from within an app, the concept could be more fully realized. But instead, they’ve handicapped the developers. I love the app, and use it all the time, but it has so much potential if it weren’t for Apple’s obsessive control.
UNLESS Kevin is right that there are only a handful of developers each pumping out thousands of “crap” apps. What’s the purpose, to get your name in print? I feel there are a lot of new developers trying their hand at writing for Cocoa than one might think. Remember that first finger painting you brought home from kindergarten Mom loved it an said it was a masterpiece. If you took that same project to your high school art teacher because you didn’t get around to completing a project, or your “dog ate it”. I am willing to bet your high school art teacher would think it’s crap and flunk you, but you mother said it was a masterpiece. I’m willing to give these folks a little latitude either they will improve it, or it will fall by the wayside when changes are needed for 4.0 of the firmware and not enough people downloaded it to make it worthwhile to go through the update process. My Grandkids love some of those simple apps that you might call crap. To each their own.