Smartphones And The Apps Users Install

Once a niche market of geeks, apps for mobile devices has turned into a major business, thanks mostly to Apple's masterful creation of a solid device locked into a single application market. Before that, while some application stores existed, there was no one stop shopping and few offered pleasant on-device shopping experiences. Geeks and techies could side-load apps from their PC's, but most people didn't bother. Now that has all changed.Installing an app on smartphones today is as easy as creating an email or adding an appointment to your calendar. Apple claims to have over 200,000 apps in the App Store, though the real number is somewhat less than that as they count ebooks as apps, and I count ebooks as, well, books. Either way, it is an impressive number of apps and iPhone users can't seem to get enough.

Nielsen released a small study on the smartphone app market and it has some interesting results. For example, here are how many apps the average device has on a given platform:

• iPhone - 37
• Android - 22
• Palm - 14
• Windows Mobile - 13
• Generic feature phone - 10
• Blackberry - 10

The survey is a bit skewed though as it only asked people who had installed apps in the past 30 days. If anyone hasn't installed a new app in a while, or ever, they aren't included. Had they been, it likely would have reduced those numbers across the board.

The most popular categories are games (shocking huh?), news/weather apps, maps and navigation followed closely by social networking sites. All of those were on more than 50% of the devices surveyed.

For the full report, head over to the Nielsen blog. I just counted the apps on my Windows Mobile device - 25. How many apps do you have installed on your smartphone?