6 Major App Stores Compared [Infographic]

Ever since Apple launched the App Store, there has been a very public race going on. With the immense success Apple had with selling applications initially, everyone wanted to develop for the iPhone platform. Other brands also stepped up to try their luck, and in many cases, were unsuccessful in being able to emulate the way Apple crafted their new income stream. Even though the Android Market is quite impressive with its over 100,000 applications, they are still miles away from the approximately 350,000 applications Apple houses in their App Store.

I am not even going to mention the other 4 “major” app stores since they aren’t even in the vicinity of either of the Android Market or the Apple App Store. The Windows platform; however, is the lowest scoring store with only 1,083 applications. Whether that is Microsoft‘s fault or whether developers simply don’t find the features and the platform appealing enough to develop for it is hard to say, but with the track record they have had with their launches, there isn’t much excitement to await from this platform at the moment unfortunately.

Online Schools put together and compiled some interesting data into an infographic that will probably not have your eyeballs leave their sockets, but there is some stuff in it that was new to me that I found very interesting. For example, I had no idea that before Angry Birds hit the market, the most successful and downloaded app ever was Crash Bandicot Nitro Kart 3D. With a 1,000,000 downloads, it represented 7 million megabytes out of Apples estimated 14 petabytes of data store in the App Store. Of course, this pales in comparison to Angry Birds which surpassed 100 million downloads last month.

The numbers are staggering, and with the Apple App Store just increasing in scale and popularity, especially now with the iPad 2, it’s highly unlikely that any other app store will catch up to its success anytime soon. Application after application is farming cash like it was harvest season, and pretty much everyone owning an iPhone, iPod or an iPad is more than happy to download apps several times a day. The most interesting thing is that with the App Store being so successful and with iTunes increasing in success by the day, the music industry really doesn’t have the P2P networks to blame for their unsuccessful businesses. I would love to check out the new data on the actual numbers since I am quite sure a lot of people nowadays would rather buy their music online than download a second grade mp3 file from a P2P network.