It was only only six weeks ago that I was talking about Apple's announcement that there were 10,000 apps on the iTunes store and iPhone owners had downloaded over 300 million apps. And now the front page of Apple's website announces that there are 15,000 apps and over 500 million downloads:
The pace at which developers are writing apps and iPhone users are downloading apps continues to be simply astonishing. Of course, these 15,000 apps are not all gems. And considering that for several weeks, the top app was a program that makes your iPhone make fart sounds (which for a while was netting its developer $10,000 every day), let's just say that there is a lot of variety out there.
But I think that the variety is a good thing. For just about anything that you want your iPhone to do, there is an app out there that does it (or there will be soon). In fact, BusinessWeek writes that some program developers who had planned to write their programs for many different cell phones are deciding that it makes economic sense to only develop an app for the iPhone. It reminds me of the decisions made for over a decade by many software companies that it only made sense to write their software for Windows, leaving Mac users out in the cold. That isn't as true today as it used to be, and the fact that all new Macs can now easily run Windows makes this less important now. Nevertheless, this was the reason that my law firm and so many others that used Macs in the 1980s and 1990s switched to using Windows. Hopefully the huge number of iPhone apps and app downloads will make the iPhone platform that much stronger.
