Apple (AAPL) Becomes Too Excellent: 100,000 Apps

It will be a shame when the day comes that Apple can’t put out good news every day. The market has become used to it. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) now has the 9th highest market cap of all companies traded on a US exchange at $173 billion, about the same at Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) and JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM).

Apple today announced that its app store, certainly the most successful software service of its kind, has reached 100,000 applications available for iPhone and iPod users. Describing the triumph Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing said“The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all the amazing apps our developers are creating.”

The success of the Apple app store is a bit misleading. Downloads from the store are dominated by a very small number of game, news, information, and self-help products. Among the apps which have the highest gross revenue based on their sales at the app store, a large portion are online versions of Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) games. The top free sites also tend to be games and social network applications.

The app store is unquestionably one of the greatest examples of the democracy of the interest. Any reasonably skilled software programmer can build an app using the Apple SDK. But, like in a democracy, getting votes is hard without money to run a campaign. Big marketers and big brands control the store

Douglas A. McIntyre