Technology News And Reviews

We knew this day was coming soon, and now its here. The App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch have reached a total of 100,000 apps.

While the total number of approved apps listed by various sites was already over 100K, at the time of my earlier post, the number available for download was just shy of 94,000, and I believed Apple was waiting until the number hit 100,000 available.

While that’s a great feat, just how many of those are really useful apps? Or put another way, just how many of those are downloaded by more than a few people, or even, none?

Appsfire, a site that tracks app usage on the iPhone, has some very sobering statistics to share with those who believe that the iPhone is their ticket to riches.

One look at the graph (above) and you can see that a very few apps make a ton of money. Move down the list a ways and you see the huge drop-off. Despite this, however, it should be clear that if you even reach 1 percent of the 50 million iPhones and iPod touches that Apple says are in the hands of consumers, you have 500,000 sales. If you sell to .1 percent, that’s still 50,000 users.

Still pretty good, if you ask me. At any rate, rather than how many apps get some large percentage of purchase (or download), I’d prefer to know how many of them are useful. I’d also like to compare that to the number of apps on jailbroken iPhones that are similarly useful. Now that would be an interesting comparison.