What happened?

Hi, is there anyone who can explain the steep decline of the number of new apps in the market in the Q4 of previous year? Specifically, December. The growth was 20-30k apps the whole year and suddenly dropped to just over 1k. What happened? its killing me...

http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx

I'd guess thats just a normal business cycle as you typically want to release a new product right before the shopping season gets started but that would only be a guess.

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Android News I Android Apps I > App Center

This was my only guess. Yet in 2009 and 2010 it wasn't the same, it just grew. Also, if you look at those stats, quite a decline can be seen in november too. I wonder what could have happened, if this is not business cycle related.

We might just be seen a natural "leveling off" in terms of Android Market / Google play content. Of course it would be great to assume that the market could grow forever, eventual the market is going to reach a saturation phase, where exponential app growth can't be maintained by the pool of potential customers. If that were the case you'd probably see a leveling off like we saw last year and the introduction of a more seasonal scale. In the previous years, you probably only saw the continued growth because there weren't that many apps and there was still room to grow!

But it's just a guess. If you find better analysis let me know!

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Android News I Android Apps I > App Center

But why'd it fall so steeply? For the saturation, i'd expect a decrease much more even.

I don't really know. I guess we'll have to wait and see if App production and sales kicks back up in the next coming months to see if its just part of the business cycle. But I'll ask around here at the AndroidPIT editors desk. Maybe someone has an informed answer!

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Android News I Android Apps I > App Center

I think that since developers are taking Android more seriously now as a developmental platform that they are more focused on improving application development, and not obsessed with just pushing out apps. As we can see with Temple Run and Instagrams releases, devs see now more than ever that high quality apps are coming to Android. Its time to improve quality, and not just numbers.