Apple App Store hits 1-million approved apps

When it comes to app stores, it seems to be all about the numbers. A number of otherwise complimentary reviews have been tainted by complaints that the Windows Phone Store is virtually empty with only 120 000 apps, and Google Play has been steadily growing its ranks to over 675 000 apps to try to rival Apple’s 700 000. And according to a new report, Apple’s App Store should be celebrating another milestone: over one-million approved iOS apps have graced its App Store to date.

Speaking to The Next Web, app discovery and promotion company Apps Fire says that since 2008, over a million apps have made it to the Store. It estimates that these include some 493 000 paid apps and 158 000 games. While there aren’t a million iOS apps in the Store at the moment, around 736 247 are currently live, of which 45% are free and 16% are games. That means, according to Apps Fire’s figures, that around 263 000 apps have been discontinued or removed from the App Store.

While Google Play is comfortably in second place in terms of the volume of apps, the figures are less comforting to Windows Phone fans. The numbers suggest that there are roughly the same number of iOS games (around 120 065) as there are all types of apps in the entire Windows Phone Store. There is still a long way to go for Windows Phone’s fledgeling store, but Microsoft’s Windows Phone manager, Joe Belfiore, said recently that 46 of the top 50 apps in Google Play and the Apple App Store are available for Windows smartphones. Populating the store with the high-demand apps it’s lacking — like Instagram, Viber, Pinterest and Wells Fargo, is “top priority”, according to Belfiore.

While Apple hasn’t confirmed the figures, the number of live apps reported by Apps Fire is in line with the figures announced by CEO Tim Cook at the iPad Mini launch last month. In terms of downloads, Android apps were downloaded over 25-billion times as of September this year — a milestone Apple hit in March.