There are 675 thousand apps available on Google Play. This figure is interesting not so much in itself, but because it demonstrates how Android is close to overtaking iOS in terms of the number of applications possible to download.
For reference, on September 12, Apple announced that there are 700 thousand applications in the App Store. In other words, at the moment both platforms are roughly on an equal footing in this regard, so it’s time to look back and compare the growth rates of both platforms.
Apple and Google launched app stores in 2008: Apple did it in July, Google in October. However, despite the small age difference, at first the App Store bypassed the Android Market (the current Google Play) in terms of the number of applications all the time.
It took only 11 months for the Apple store to get 50 thousand applications, while Google took a year and a half. The App Store gained 100 thousand applications already in October 2009, the Android Market reached this mark only after 11 months. The App Store reached a beautiful figure of 250 thousand applications in April 2010, and the Google Corporation’s market only 15 months later.
But over the past year, along with the rapid growth of downloads (we wrote about this yesterday), Android has also been gaining the number of applications. The difference in their number between the two main competitors in the mobile platform market was decreasing. And, it is quite possible that in a couple of months Google Play will overtake or at least equal the App Store in terms of the number of available applications.