Communications and Technology Industry Research

Mobilewalla, the search, discovery and analytics engine that tracks apps in real time, has released a survey result that shows that the total number of individual mobile apps in the marketplace will soon reach a major milestone, hitting the 1 million mark within the next week.

Mobile apps creation has become a hobby for many intellectuals and a survey finds that the more than 15,000 mobile apps are released every week. These software applications usually designed to run on smartphones and tablet computers.

Distribution platforms like Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Android Market, Windows Phone Marketplace, Amazon Appstore and Nokia (News - Alert) Store are the backbones for the creators of the apps. The Apple platform has close to 600,000 apps (60 percent market share), followed by Android with 320,000 apps (32 percent), Blackberry with nearly 44,000 apps (4.4 percent) and Windows with close to 36,000 apps (3.6 percent).

"This is truly an astonishing accomplishment that cannot be ignored," says Anindya Datta, the founder and executive chairman of Mobilewalla. "The growth of apps is the fastest growing consumer segment in the history of commerce. The app race began in July, 2008 when the iTunes App store opened and Google (News - Alert) followed with the launch of the Android operating system in October, 2008. Recently, app marketplaces have been launched for the Blackberry RIM and Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Phone platforms."

As per real-time data collected by analytics firm Mobilewalla, the mobile app count rose to 987,863 across all four platforms (Apple, Android (News - Alert), Blackberry and Windows) on December 2.

"In the early days most of the initial apps were ‘fun, indie’ apps, such as the Doodle Jump game, one of the first mass-market apps to gain viral popularity and paved the entryway for other mass successes like Angry Birds," says Datta.

Datta pointed out that the nature of the app ecosystem changed quickly – new apps were designed to improve everyone’s’ lives, disseminate news, weather and even crop data in places like rural India.