In 
Apples iPhone and iPad are ruling the gadget space because they have access to more than 400,000 apps. Android is popular because it is backed by prolific developers who have been able to write a large number of apps in a very short time. Yeah, right. The truth is that a vast majority of these apps are outright silly. Perhaps they even have a number of apps for being silly. No one downloads them, no one even cares that these apps exist. They just sit in the virtual app market for few weeks or months, and then they rollover and die.
An app stores dominance should have more to do with relevance to the customer and less to do with sheer numbers. But that is no longer the case. The app game has become totally about numbers. The total number of apps might be useful as a marketing tool. Smartphone buyers are probably impressed by the fact that the Android or the Apple devices have access to such a huge library of apps. That is why major companies like Apple and Google have started favouring quantity over quality.
Analysis after analysis shows that a vast majority of smartphone users dont download any app at all. They just keep using the apps that come pre-loaded in their phone. Most of them wont use more than six or seven apps during the lifetime of their smartphone. A vast majority of the apps are completely redundant. They could even be outright copies of each other. In the app market, every app that is remotely successful has hundreds and even thousands of clones. How many foreign currency converters or flashlight applications does one need?
Can you imagine, we even have an app called iFart, which is not free; it costs $.99, and promises to recreate many different kinds of gaseous sounds. Then there is an app called Drunk Dialler, which probably helps you find out if you are too drunk to dial a number. There is simply no dearth of apps that are offensive, at times expensive, and they do not serve not a single useful purpose. A large number of these apps for Apple devices and Android ones tend to be on the disgusting side.
It is also very unfortunate that Apple and the backers of Android platform are doing so little to ensure that the bad apps are kept out of their app stores. They are not keeping the bad apps out, because they are obsessed with having the highest number of apps. Perhaps the value of apps in swaying the opinion of buyers in favour of devices from this or that vendor is overrated. After all, Android was able to catch up with Apple even though, during its initial years, it did not have as many apps. Most smartphones, even those running Nokias Symbian or Samsungs Bada, already have all the apps that a vast majority of users would ever want to have.
The case can be made that the large number of apps serve the purpose of creating the feeling that platform is growing. But a certain degree of rationality is required to bring in a sense of balance to the app space. The number of apps that are part of any platform hardly matters, if the vast majority of these apps are useless junk, which will never be downloaded.
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