Every 90 seconds

The What’s New page on AppShopper sort of blows my mind, for a couple reasons.

First, just the sheer quantity of new apps posted to the app store every day. I was flipping through the new apps, as I’m wont to do from time to time, and noticed that the oldest app on the first page was only 49 minutes old. There are 20 apps on each page and these are all new releases. No updates. All version 1.0 apps. 49 minutes, 20 new apps. I did a little more browsing and realized that 1,126 apps (just over 56 pages on AppShopper) had been posted to the App Store in the last 24 hours. Thinking maybe that was an anomaly, I checked the previous days additions: 1,085 new apps.

Because I’m lazy I’m going to say that two days worth of data is enough to conclude the iOS app market is growing by roughly 1,000 apps per day. There are currently 530,652 apps on the App Store and that number is increases by one roughly every 90 seconds. If you could somehow manage to download an app every second, it would take you a little more than 6 days to download every one, during which time another 6,145 apps would appear on the App Store.

Given the huge number of new apps released every day, how in the world are you supposed to get your app noticed? I’m not even going to try and get into that right now. But it probably doesn’t hurt if your app is actually good, which leads me to the next point.

I know that developing is hard and it can be tempting to take shortcuts… Look, I don’t want to be mean, but skimming through some of these apps, just, damn. Here’s an assortment of some of the apps that were released over the last 24 hours.

gocart race
gocart race

The first app I stumbled across was gocart race. What is going on here? Maybe it’s just me, but some of the detail on the “go carts” appears to be missing. And everywhere else for that matter. The red rectangle seems to be winning. Hey maybe it’s fun, but there is nothing here that’s makes me want to find out. Compare this to another $0.99 app: Real Racing 2 and tell me which you’d be more likely to spend your hard earned $0.99 on.

Rapid finger
Rapid finger

Two others that jumped out at me were Rapid finger and Beauty Scan!. But not in a good way. Rapid finger tests how fast you can press a button. That’s it. No wait, you can press a button repeatedly and it’ll tell you how many taps per minute you averaged. On the bright side, it’s free.

Beauty Scan!
Beauty Scan!

Beauty Scan! (exclamation point), however, is not. As near as I can tell, it will take your picture and put it in this mirror thingy. There’s only the one screen shot, so I can’t say for certain and it would cost me $0.99 to find out. This app is brought to you by the makers of Ugly Scan! (another exclamation point!) which includes this phrase in the app description: “Trick your friends by taking there picture and scanning their face if there ugly or not!”. That’s some good grammar right they’re!

MulThis
MulThis

MulThis might also be good, actually probably the most useful of the bunch. I have a soft spot for education apps because they’re at least trying to serve a greater purpose, but this is just really hard to look at without wanting to stab something.

Panties Detector (FREE) will determine what color panties the detectee is wearing when they place their (not there) finger on the scanner. They also make Cooties Detector (FREE) and Mood Detector (FREE). Rounding out the suite is Poop Analyzer (FREE). These are free, but if the ads are somehow the only thing you find annoying about them, you can pay $0.99 for ad free versions of each.

Lastly there was the Tim Tebowâ„¢ app. A bunch of Tim Tebow wallpapers. But look again at the name of this app. It’s trademarked! The developers somehow managed to trademark the name Tim Tebow. One has to wonder if the real Tim Tebow has been informed and what sort of deal he has struck with the developers to allow him to keep using his name.

I could keep going. But I won’t. There’s a metric buttload of new apps being released each day but how many of those qualify as great or even good apps? Of course, creating a great app doesn’t guarantee success, though it surely helps (someone tell me that’s true, please). Then again, I’ve seen some really mediocre apps in various top 200 lists, so marketing clearly plays a big, possibly bigger, role than quality. But why make the marketing guys do all the work? Take a little extra time to add that extra bit of functionality and polish that’s going to make your app stand out from the rest. In a good way.