When you read about people wanting to switch to an Android phone, they will say that the iPhone has the most applications. Last thing I heard about this was that the iPhone has about 100.000 applications and Android about 16.000 to 20.000. This is only a factor five. That one number is bigger than the other is obvious. But is that the best way to compare these two app stores?

I think it’s better to compare the app stores, or the applications, by comparing the different applications. If the iPhone App Store has five times as many applications, because many applications have copies that do almost the same thing, can you then talk about having more applications? I don’t think so. It’s true that there are more actual applications, but that doesn’t make the iPhone itself more useful.

You could also think of it this way: if you can have every applications that you want on the Android phones, then it doesn’t matter how many applications its App Store has.