According to Nielsen’s numbers, the top 10 Android apps accounted for 43 per cent of all the time spent in apps. If you stretch it out to the top 50, those apps account for 61 per cent of all time spent in apps. To quote Nielsen:
“With 250,000+ Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950+ apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie”
That means for all the brouhaha in the app race prick measuring nonsense contest, it’s so beyond stupid. No one uses that many apps. No one wants to use that many apps because most of the apps on the Market and the App Store are complete garbage. Surprise! We want to use good stuff. [Nielsen]
Chris
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 7:51 AMPathetic. I’m surprised they let you write this garbage let alone post it up here.
olearymo
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:26 AMCould you elaborate why it’s ‘garbage’, Chris? Not sure I’m getting your point.
Chris
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:30 AMJust stirring the pot Casey!
(To be honest, I may or may not have posted this on the wrong site.. n_n)
Terry
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:09 PMotherwise known as trolling eh?
Chris
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:38 PMUnintentional trolling, yes. :P
Apologies.
olearymo
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:28 AMExcellent points Casey, I’ve always felt the iOS ‘millions of apps’ and other companies’ similar cries is completely useless.
Who wants millions of apps? And then, it contributes to the lack of interest in amazing OS-es like WebOS, which has ‘only’ thousands of good, useful apps.
Ash
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:12 AMPeople who consider freedom of choice valuable (and as an Android owner, you do), you will prefer 250K+ apps on the market rather than 250 select few that you have to choose from. One’s man trash is another mans treasure. Sure you may only use 100 apps of the thousands on the marketplace, but at the end of the day, it gives you the ability to choose from variety, rather than exclude them because the OS manufacturer considered them garbage or similar to another existing app.
olearymo
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:15 AMThere’s got to be a realistic limit to that, Ash. I’m not saying there should only be a hundred apps. Perhaps a couple of hundred thousand. But millions, no sir. That’s just filler crap. They need to stop this app war.
It’s time… to live again.
Stephen
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:33 AMSo does this mean Gizmodo and its sister sites will stop bagging Honeycomb and WebOS for their 250-odd apps?
Stephen
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:36 AMI should point out that I use iOS and Android 2.3, and sorting the decent apps from the dross can be a real pain. There are plenty of apps in both stores whose comments consist entirely of “Doesn’t work” or “Crashes constantly”.
olearymo
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:14 AMIf anything, the iOS app store is harder to sift through than the Android marketplace.
I own a Nexus One and an iPad 2. Finding apps on the iPad is basically a matter of pressing ‘next’ and going through hundreds of results for a search. Great system, Apple.
When I had a Palm Pre (RIP) there were much fewer apps but there was less CRAP.
Sultan
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 10:01 AMGranted there are less apps in the Market than there are in the iOS Appstore. But if I’m downloading apps on my iPod Touch, they’re usually games, quite good ones I might add. Where Android does have a lot of ports and a few great games themselves, BUT if I get an app from the Market, it is generally an app that changes the customisability of my phone substantially. So it might ‘alter’ the use of my phone but I’m not technically ‘in’ the app per se. I wonder if that statistic takes into account Launchers as well, because if it did, I’m spending 100% of my time in that app, so that would have to boost that number substantially if everyone who used Launchers was taken into consideration. There are some of those apps in the iOS Appstore but they’re not as varied as they would be in the Market as iOS is not an open-sourced platform.
klaw81
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 10:35 AMA good point. I have quite a few apps I don’t “use” per se – they’re just there, doing their thing in the background.
Widgets, launchers, alternative keyboards, customisation apps – they’re all good, useful things, but you don’t really “running” them, you just install them for the functions and features they provide.
Terry
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:10 PMWell, duh.
If you find an app that works, does the job and doesn’t screw everything up, you stick with it.
So, naturally you’re only going to keep using the same apps.
warcroft
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:15 PMYeah, I always hear “WP7′s lack of apps in an issue”. But really, most of the apps on iOS and Android are garbage.
Andrew
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:40 PMI’d say that the WP7 approach was built in recognition of what this survey shows. They knew that people spend the majority of time using a core set of apps, so they built the functionality of those apps into the OS / UI to improve overall experience.
Having taken care of that, the next task it to provide a good browser experience, and everything so far looks rosy in that department. Now you’ve got 90% of the entire phone usage covered, and you have no real need for a million extra apps.
The only thing better than apps it to no need them.
TSH
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:05 PMThink about your PC at home (Apple, Windows, Linux, whatever). Of all the thousands of applications available for it, how many have you bought and how many do you use on a daily basis?
Myself, I use maybe half a dozen applications daily – browser, Office, games and maybe a utility here and there. The most relevant part of this news is “quality over quantity”.
Franz
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:37 PMThis article is correct, most of the apps in the market are junk. And at least of third of the apps you do download/keep are ones you just show off to friends and use rarely yourself, or in my case, when everyone starts obnoxiously bragging about nifty features their phone has, I can’t help but humiliate them all with my Galaxy S2.
People have bagged the Yahoo Finance widget/app but there’s nothing close to besting it, all YF needs is the 3rd decimal value.
trk
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 6:40 PMAndroid users dont need to spend their time in apps, because the OS itself has so much functionality built in, and the ‘Google Experience’ apps cover so much of your usage you dont need to be jumping from app to app.
ie: I can use the “Maps” app to replace over 9000 Apple apps for finding the nearest St George ATM / Dunkin Donuts store / ANZ Bank / whatever, because the Google Maps app does it all.
Richard
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 7:15 PMThe Google Experience Apps are on the marketplace and thus potentially are included in these figures and aren’t treated any differently from others such as Facebook etc.
Bender
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 10:49 PMDoes this include the use of widgets as app use. Because if not I get most of my daily information from there as opposed to actually running the Apps.
I do however use things like Pulse News reader as it has too much valuable information to fit on a widget and the occasional game when I’m waiting for something. As for the force closes isn’t that just because people are using apps with underpowered/ incompatible devices? I have a Desire HD which gets very few force closes despite being almost a year old.