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900,000 /s are Chinese junk, and half of those are the same apps with different developer fake names and different prices. (and yes, I got swindled that way on a note app) High numbers don't equate to high quality. They need more oversight on the devs and the apps before "1 million" means anything. All your base are berong to us."
 
Dunno, but there's also probably tens ... if not hundreds... of thousands of apps that no longer show up because their developers stopped paying the yearly $99 Apple dev signup, which is required even if the app is free.

Other popular smartphone systems usually only charge developers once.

It's especially bad for hobbyists and those who put out free apps. In the past, I've made custom WinMo, WebOS and Android apps for my family and friends, something that would cost hundreds of dollars over the years to do on iOS.

Even if you just gave an app to family as your "testers", their test profile would disappear each year if you didn't always give Apple their ~$100.

The $99.00 pays for things like advertising, bandwidth for downloading their app, storage space. If you give it away for free, Apples not making money, they still need to pay for expenses and overhead.

Apple wants people to actively develop their applications. Not put it up in the store and abandon it. Then does not support the next version of iOS so when people install it does not work. That does not make for a great user experience or a good app store.
 
One reason why there are so many junks in app store is because of the restrictions of ios.

E.g one touch contact photo dial/Sms homescreen shortcut app. Developers have to make 50 different apps so you could put 50 direct dial on the home screen.

On android nobody does this as creating shortcut is built in
 
The $99.00 pays for things like advertising, bandwidth for downloading their app, storage space. If you give it away for free, Apples not making money, they still need to pay for expenses and overhead.

Apple wants people to actively develop their applications. Not put it up in the store and abandon it. Then does not support the next version of iOS so when people install it does not work. That does not make for a great user experience or a good app store.

There are plenty of abandoned apps in the AppStore before their $99 subscription period is over.

The AppStore can be a loss maker that drives iDevice sales.
 
Is is just me that hasn't been receiving macrumors's safari notifications at all for the past 2 months? I remember it working so well for the first week then nothing.
 
There are plenty of abandoned apps in the AppStore before their $99 subscription period is over.

The AppStore can be a loss maker that drives iDevice sales.

And what happens to the app once the subscription period is over? nuff said. Apple usually does not like taking a loss just to sell iPhones/iPads. The iTune store pays for itself.

Jobs used to mock the carriers and their walled app gardens, and then he turned around and built an even higher walled garden of his own.

At least the carriers never prevented smartphone users from downloading apps from other stores, or making their own and giving them to friends and family.

The phone carriers did indeed have their own garden.

They used their networks as commodities, leveraging phone makers exactly how to make their phones, what it should do or not do. With the iPhone that all changed and the tables turned.

Now it gave the phone manufactures & more importantly the consumer the choice of what they wanted based on their wallets and not a phone the carriers approved.
 
I use my iPad mainly for music, and thankfully the app store is pretty lush when it comes to quality music apps. But even still, I have maybe 40 non-stock apps loaded, and I probably only use 25 of them in a weeks's time.

If you take out all the duds, clones, and buggy to the point of being useless apps, I bet that number would be cut by at least a third.

Still, as someone who uses iOS, Android, and WP8 all the time, I still say iOS has the highest quality/best selection of apps. A testament to both Apple and the amazing dev community.
 
Having 1 million apps is more of a liability than an achievement. Most could probably be replaced with web apps. And Apple doesn't let you search or order apps as well as Amazon lets you search for products or as Google lets you search for web pages.

That is what Steve Jobs said at first, you can put you apps on the web. But developers found out the no one will pay for a web based app. But they will pay for the exact same thing as an app.
 
Apple could invest as much resources into providing the tools and resources to developers to make quality web apps as they do with native apps. Some things can truly only be done through native apps today, but many things could be done with web apps. But Apple doesn't give out anything that's close to the iOS (or OS X) SDKs or Xcode for building web apps.

If they did that, you'd see a lot more quality web apps. IE, Apple could build a store / IAP and iWebs for web apps, so that people would be willing to invest time in making quality web apps since they could generate revenue.

But you don't need Apple's SDKs to make web apps. What do the others do? The problems are that web apps require an Internet connection, and they don't really do anything special besides use a few times more CPU power.
 
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1,000,000 apps and a search feature that can only show them one at a time :rolleyes:
 
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