60% of the apps on the Apple App Store have never been downloaded

Even with 25 Billion downloads, 400,000 apps have never been downloaded

Looking at the Apple iPhone App Store, if I spend 30 seconds reading about each App to decide whether I wanted it or not, it would take me 150,000 minutes, or 2,500 hours or 104.17 days to go through them all.  

I wrote that in December 2010. At that time the Apple Store had 300,000 iPhone apps. Today the Apple App store has a total of 650,000 apps, if you combine both iPhone and iPad apps. That is really too many apps for anyone to actually browse through. The main Android App store, Google Play had 600,000 apps and there are also thousands of other Android apps available from other sources. 

Adeven has free analytic service Apptrace which collects iOS app data in the 155 countries that support the App Store. A study conducted by Adeven shows that 60% of the apps on the Apple App store, around 400,000, have never been downloaded. I would think the situation is similar on Google Play.

Anyone browsing the Apple App Store or Google Play knows that there are too many me-too apps. But the Adeven study reveals that in some cases there are just way to many me too apps. An iPhone user looking for a flashlight app has a staggering 1,899 choices for a really simple app where one really does not provide functionality different from the others.

App Store number are pretty much hype. It really is the number of useful apps which should be the metric.

Source of data: Adeven through Phone Arena

Related Articles:

The App Bubble

App stores and markets, by the numbers