Android Market now has 100,000 apps; make that 70,000

As has happened before, there is a discrepancy between AndroLib and Google about the number of apps available in the Android Market. According to the former, in the last 3 months, the Market has practically doubled from 50,000 to 100,000 with 1 billion apps downloaded on Android handsets. Visit the source link to view AndroLib's realtime count of the number of downloads from the Android Market. So just how much money are Android developers raking in? Not enough to cover the down payment on a new pocket protector, according to the stats. 61.4% of the apps are free. But with Google activating 66,000 new Android phones daily, and with the excitement created by the sold out Motorola DROID X, developers are set to create many more apps for Google's open source OS. Google claims that there are 70,000 apps in the Android Market and the theory is that the difference is apps for foreign countries which apparently AndroLib counts and Google doesn't. Either way, there has been stunning growth-enough to make it a potential horse race with the Apple App Store which once held a gigantic lead on the Android Market. We're not suggesting that the latter will overtake the former soon, just that with the strides that are being made by the green robot, in 18-24 months the difference between the two in the number of listings could be extremely small.

source: AndroLib via InformationWeek