Google Google Google???

So it looks like Mr. Simmon’s struck again citing a series of crazy stats about how fast the Android marketplace is growing. Wow – they have 50,000 apps, an increase of 250% since January and they may take over Apple and all of that with 60% of the apps free. OMG that sounds awesome. But allow me to introduce Exhibit A – the ‘F’ word – Facts.

There’s a reason that the Android store is growing so fast. Anyone can add anything to the store. There’s no quality control whatsoever and no limitations on what sort of shit people can upload. In fact, there’s a troll that’s added about 1,000 pointless apps that are just shortcuts to websites that bring him advertising – count those towards your 50k. But that’s just the beginning. See, Google, for all it’s mightiness, doesn’t know what an app is. They think that ringtones and wallpapers are apps. Ever make a wallpaper? Well guess what? You’re a developer now. Throw that onto the market and count it…and repeat. So when you hear that they have all of these apps and they’re all free, this is what they’re talking about – wallpapers and ringtones. Skewed much? But let’s go further. From AndroLib (the same site that’s providing the 50k app number) comes another stat about app distribution:

See that? Look at the number of apps with less than 5,000 downloads – it’s 85.5% of all apps. In fact 40.5% are downloaded less than 50 times – that’s 20,000 “apps”. Think about it – make a wallpaper that involves a boob, a bike, a gangster…basically anything half way decent and expect some tweens to download it. When you think about the stats you quickly see how many useless apps they have.

Now at 10,000 apps a month that’s over 300 apps per day. If a casual user checks apps once a week that means over 2,000 new apps were added. There’s no way that the good apps float to the top in this ecosystem. Instead you get a cesspool and you just have to wade through the shit. Want to search on your desktop to make it easier? So sorry – no desktop app. Oh and as an aside there’s no SD support to store your 50,000 apps but that’s just humorous.

Now let’s assume that the Windows Marketplace were like the Android marketplace and allowed anyone to add any app for free and we did the same style of math. How many apps would there be? Take all the freeware out there, add all the wallpaper packs (one app per wallpaper) and all the ringtones, and now add all of the Flash lite games (since we can play those) and then all of the Java games (heck, here’s 50,000 Java apps alone) and we have emulators for NES, GameBoy, SNES, Genesis…then install a Win95 emulator and count those apps. Hell, why not just run Android on my phone and throw 50,000 down that way. See, when you start this silly counting like Google does you can throw stats out there even if they’re misleading. It’s their marketplace and their style of accounting that leads to useless stats. Google is trying to win an app war, but their market is just swamped with fecal matter.

Ironically, the Goog article followed a posting about how WP7 is going to limit games that have Live integration and the reason is quality control. Anyone want to talk to Goog about a good store versus a large store? They’ve formed a megamarket of cheap knockoffs that aren’t worth the free download and they’re proud of it. In fact, it’s almost embarrassing that they don’t have more apps with their Madoff style of counting:)

And you threw it out there so I’ll address it. Why have people ported Android to other devices but the reverse hasn’t happened? Well for one there’s a simple bootloader that runs on ARM chips so it’s easy to get Android running so for free you can see what the Android hype is about…then thankfully you can revert back to a decent device once you realize that it’s all hype. But also, you Goog gals actually think you have the perfect product despite it’s obvious flaws. Yup – that fanboyism runs deep…all hail the mighty green thing.