20,000 apps in Android Market? Better count again

AndroLib serves as a search engine and a directory for the Android Market. It also compiles statistics. For example, it shows that 61.6% of the apps in the Market are free. It also showed a total of 20,000 paid and unpaid apps. When stories started to appear yesterday, noting that the Android Market had reached the 20,000 app threshold, Google noticed and called TechCrunch, the sister site of MobileCrunch where the story originated, and gave them a correct count. It seems that there are 16,000 apps in the Market. Kudos to the Mountain View based company for setting the record straight. They also said that they are working on ways to distribute statistics in a more accurate and timely manner. As for AndroLib, they are not totally taking the blame. They say that either Google's count stops at the end of November, or is counting U.S. apps only. One possibility that they admit to is that perhaps they did not get a correct count of apps removed after publication by Google or the app developer. Anyone want to do a manual count?

source: TechCrunch