As virtual application stores grow, so does the number of useless applications in them. In the AppStore there are over 350.000 applications officially available, in the Android Market still around 300.00 and the other stores are coming strongly behind. In these conditions, a study conducted recently on thousands of applications for Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry OS, revealed that 26% of the applications downloaded online are used only once. To be honest, it's not surprising considering how many useless applications there are in the application stores, but the worst part is that many of them cost money.
Localytics looked at thousands of apps across every major mobile platform using its app analytics software. The company found that one-time app usage was slowly on the rise throughout 2010 — in the first quarter it was around 22 percent, but by the end of the year it grew to 28 percent. The increase is most likely due to more consumers getting smartphones throughout the year, and we can expect the number to grow even further over the next few years.
The statistics are worrisome both for application developers and for publishers like Apple or Google, who have to much more carefully sort out the applications accepted in their own application stores. My opinion is that in the future we will see more and more bad but also expensive applications in the AppStore and in the Android Market.
