100,000 iPad Apps Now Available

The Apple App Store has hit a major milestone of 100,000 iPad-specific apps.  When you consider the iPad has only been around for a little over a year, this is a very impressive figure.

According to figures released by MacStories, Apple hit 100,161 dedicated iPad apps only 452 days after it all began.  At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference recently, Apple themselves announced it had 90,000 iPad apps.  This shows just how much momentum they have, as that number has grown in less than a month’s time.

While it is certainly not the only reason for Apple’s success, the app ecosystem they have managed to create is a major advantage in the competitive mobile tech marketplace.  There have been over 10 billion downloads from the Apple App Store, a success that has inspired the company to create an OS X version and name it the Mac App Store.  This is one of the clearest examples of how mobile technology is influencing desktop computing.

While there are said to be more than 500,000 approved iOS apps in the App Store, this number may be a bit of an over exaggeration.  According to dedicated app blog 148apps, about 20 percent of all approved applications are abandoned by their developers and removed from the store.  There are a number of reasons for this, including incompatibility with the latest OS and violation of Apple’s rather strict terms.

Users seem to love discovering and buying apps from the Apple App Store, mostly because Apple have made the whole experience transparent and simple.  While other platforms are aware of how important apps are to the mobile market, no-one seems to be able to match Apple in terms of the user experience.  App downloads also make a lot of money for Apple, who keep a 30 percent cut from every transaction.