App Store Numbers Misleading?

Tony Bradley:

Apple’s Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, recently pointed out that Apple receives more than 10,000 new app submissions each week. Yes, every seven days Apple receives a volume of new apps equivalent to the Android Market. Schiller cited this statistic to explain how Apple is somewhat a victim of its own success and that with so many submissions sometimes apps fall through the cracks.

According to Mobclix.com, more than 100 million apps are downloaded from the Apple app store each month. Doing the math based on the number of iPhones users, that means that iPhone users download an average of 11 apps per month.

As with all averages that means there are iPhone users who don’t download any apps in a given month, and some other iPhone user downloading 22 apps to make up the difference. As with all statistics, the impressively overwhelming amount of app downloads have to be taken with a grain of salt.

I’d venture to say that most of those 100,000 iPhone apps are pretty crappy with very few downloads. The Simplenotes and Tweeties of the App Store are few and far between.