Quality vs. Quantity

John Gruber:

Is the App Store popular because the iPhone is great? Or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular? There’s a big difference between those two arguments. The latter is the argument Microsoft has long made regarding the advantage of Windows: Windows is great because Windows has the most software and most developers.

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But my interest remains, as ever, in the quality of the apps, not the quantity. Let’s say that when the dust starts to settle in this market, Android winds up with far fewer total apps than iPhone OS, but they’re of generally higher quality. That would make Android the Mac to the iPhone’s Windows. I would switch to that platform. (Feel free to substitute WebOS for Android in the above hypothetical.)

The fact that Apple’s advertising campaign for the iPhone over the last year has been focused on the apps that run on the iPhone — and not the iPhone itself — is telling.