Walt Mossberg on the BlackBerry Torch

Walt Mossberg:

But there is still one big downside: third-party apps. While the iPhone boasts 225,000 of these downloadable programs, and Android claims 70,000, the BlackBerry platform is still stuck at a measly 9,000.

I know space is limited in newspaper reviews, but this “how many apps are in the respective app stores” metric is being given too much weight — not just by Mossberg, either. I’ve said this before, but by this metric, we’d all be using Windows, not the Mac. Which platform has the most apps is interesting, but which platform has the best apps is more important. I say the answer to both questions is iOS, but what if Android gets to 300,000 or 400,000 apps or whatever before iOS does? Would that make Android better?

Put another way: is it a bigger problem that RIM’s App World has only 9,000 apps, or, that the typical quality and polish of their apps is beneath that of the apps in Apple’s App Store? A simple app count is nice and comfortable because it’s not subjective (like my statement in the previous sentence about quality and polish), but it’s potentially misleading.

★ Wednesday, 4 August 2010