In a research published by Sensor Tower, Apple’s App Store is estimated to home 5 million apps by the end of 2020.
Sensor Tower, an app intelligence platform that helps app developers with app store optimization, produced the figures based on historical analysis of data and trends from the App Store beginning from its launch in 2008.
App Store had only about 5,000 active apps in 2008. In seven years, that figure has jumped up and Sensor Tower’s growth chart shows that in 2015 there were about 1.75 million active apps. The figures will reach about 2.93 million by the end of 2016.
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And in the four years time, from 2016 to 2020, the research projects a 75 per cent growth in the number of active apps as the App Store will host 5.06 million apps.
The report also highlights that amongst the newly added apps each month, majority of them are game apps. The latest gaming app Pokémon GO has daily revenue of over $10 million, according to App Annie, a business intelligence company.
Earlier this month, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook tweeted, “@AppStore developers have now earned over $50 billion! Congratulations on your success and such inspired creativity.”
With escalating number of apps, Sensor Tower’s report emphasizes that Apple needs to gear up new policies and techniques so that new app developers don’t face discover ability challenges.
“We’ve seen the first steps on Apple’s part to address discoverability issues, such as launching new categories and announcing plans for Search Ads in advance of June’s WWDC (Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference). But in light of our new findings, we’re convinced that far more significant changes to the navigation, curation, and overall presentation of the App Store will be needed to support an ecosystem that’s twice today’s size just four years from now,” said Randy Nelson, Sensor Tower’s head of mobile insights.
