The iTunes App Store at 100,000: Can we stop counting, already?

Ever since Apple launched its App Store barely 16 months ago, we've paid a lot of attention -- indeed, too much -- to the number of applications it contains. As the App Store crossed the 100,000 title barrier last week, it occurred to me that the bigger this number gets, the less it actually means.

I get that Apple has won the sheer-number sweepstakes. I appreciate that no other mobile storefront can even come close. I also understand how broad software availability (in terms of sheer numbers as well as ease of acquisition) has helped fuel the growth of the iPhone/iPod touch universe. I just think we attach way too much importance to this single figure, and it distorts our ability to understand ultimate value to end users and developers alike.

So many titles, not enough room

Never mind that no one person could ever assess, let alone install and use, anything approaching a broad cross-section of this ever expanding library. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of these titles are near-dormant, gathering dust while the masses pay attention to newer, higher-profile offerings. Forget that this number is bloated by countless apps that replicate bodily functions, play visual party tricks, and otherwise consume time that could be productively spent...I don't know, composing e-mails to your mother.

Does the world really need fifty different ways to display the time? Or forty-five weather forecasting apps or a couple of hundred alarm clocks? At what point does the sheer size of the library become so large that successive additions become meaningless? I accept that there's a certain value in choice -- that in a tiny library, users would be ill-served by a product category with only a couple of feature-limited, badly integrated choices. A larger playground increases the size of the app-specific talent pool and ensures someone looking for an alarm clock will eventually find what he or she needs.

But there's choice and there's choice. When neighborhood supermarkets replaced the corner store, we all benefitted from greater choice and more competitive pricing. Economies of scale will do that, as stores that buy in larger quantities have greater buying power than those with smaller inventories. But as plain old supermarkets were supplanted by big-box megastores, we ended up with too much of a good thing. A thirty-minute cruise through the aisles easily doubled or tripled as many of us got lost in the cavernous new temples of conspicuous consumption. We'd stand in front of the ketchup shelves, unable to decide between the ten brands, fifteen different sizes, and packaging combinations, and even colors...remember green and purple? We'd end up with more than we needed, or stuff we hadn't intended on buying in the first place.

Lost in the wilderness

Apple's App Store has gone well beyond the big-box stage. Shopping there isn't the focused, quick and direct process it once was, and by the time most of us are done loading up on new code, we inevitably end up with stuff we didn't want or need in the first place. Worse for Apple, it can't simply build a bigger building to house all its new inventory. Computer and iPhone screens aren't getting bigger, and new and existing titles find themselves fighting for an ever dimmer slice of virtual storefront for consumers' increasingly ADHD-infused attention.

It hurts developers as well as consumers. We wrestle with the challenge of finding what we want without pulling our hair out in the process, while developers simply try to avoid getting lost in the ever growing ocean of offerings -- assuming, of course, that they can get past Apple's app approval process to get into that ocean in the first place.

I hesitate to blame Apple, as it's simply riding the wave of the most buzzworthy mobile device to hit consumers' radar since Ford's Model T. As long as we're content to measure the iPhone platform's worth by the number of available apps, Apple is perfectly content to trumpet each major milestone, and absolutely justified in doing so. For a company that has long prided itself on simple, easily understood methods for users, nothing's easier to articulate than a big number that dwarfs all competitors, and keeps getting bigger on a seemingly exponential path.

Even if, from where I sit, it's an ultimately meaningless number, it remains a marketer's dream, so don't expect Apple to stop flogging it.

New ways to measure

Still, it leaves the door open for measures of value that reflect actual utility. Google's Android platform may sport a software library that's an order of magnitude smaller than Apple's, but Google doesn't live in the same download-and-use universe that Apple does. Its core strength lies in its expanding universe of increasingly integrated Web-based services. And successive generations of its mobile platform will reflect this shifting reality, especially as 3G wipes GSM and CDMA off the map, and 4G-based technologies like LTE move into the mainstream.

It may seem laughable now given AT&T's and other carriers' troubles with network coverage of any kind, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, mobile bandwidth will be so abundant that the same paradigms of always-on Web services that we take for granted on our conventional laptops and desktops will seamlessly apply to our smartphones as well. And the download-and-use metaphor will fade.

So although the size of Google's library currently places it in a firm second place in the mobile online store rankings and gives it a fair degree of street cred, I doubt Google hangs on the daily figures as much as Apple does given the sea change that will fundamentally change how we get work (and play) done on mobile devices.

For now, though, we still measure our devices by the number of apps available for download, and we continue to focus on quantity when handicapping the various platforms against each other. As mobile infrastructure matures and consumers improve their ability to assess the value proposition of a platform's complete feature set -- and not just its simple library size -- simply having the biggest of anything may no longer be enough to sustain interest. Bigger, after all, isn't always better.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.