The Android Market has reached a birthday of sorts.  The mobile application market place has reached 500,000 submissions.  According to the research firm research2guidance this big milestone was reached in September.  The month of September in itself broke records by bringing in 42,000 applications to the Android Market.

Though this is a big deal for the Android Market it is not all that it is cracked up to be.  Thirty seven percent of the 500,000 have been decommissioned, unpublished, or otherwise removed for a variety of reasons.  Though this may be lackluster news for Android it still leaves around 315,000 apps active on the Android Market.

Android’s biggest competitor, Apple, had a head start and reached the same milestone last year.  Apple has much more strict rules with regards to application development and publishing which leaves them with a slightly lower twenty four percent of apps pulled from the iPhone’s app store.  This leaves Apple with approximately 456,000 active apps due to their higher submission rate and lower decommission rate.  According to Apple between their three devices, iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad have more than 500,000 active apps.

In their recent report research2guidance said “Although Apple regularly cleans up its store from inappropriate or outdated content, its active application share still exceeds that of Android.  “It is likely that the more rigid application submission requirements prevent developers from publishing multiple trial or low quality applications whereas publishers in the Android Market place a lot of market testing, trials, demo, and malware content. Over 78% of the apps removed from the Android Market were free, which could mean that publishers put more effort into the applications they place with the pay-per-download business model, thus ensuring that it is kept longer in store.”

Though there is a lot of time spent talking about the competing companies there are other mobile devices on the market that are making moves as well.  Though they are nowhere near as impressive as Android and iPhone, Microsoft’s Market Place has over 35,000 apps.  Research2guidance also shared a few thoughts on Microsoft’s budding application development.  The share of deactivated apps in the WP7 Marketplace today stands at just thirteen percent.  “However, WP7 Marketplace is a comparably young store and many publishers are still exploring its potential. Fifteen months after its launch (comparable to the WP7 store now), the Android Market similarly had 86% of its apps active and a significant application store clean-up didn’t get started until the end of 2010.”

It only makes sense that app developers would choose the platform that they think best suits their app as well as their profit potential.  Apple started it all which gives them an advantage in the highly competitive market.  Though there is truth to this the numbers show that Android is hot on Apple’s tail and Microsoft has years of experience and billions of dollars in backing to catch up with the mobile giants.  When the Apple App Store first started there were a meager 500 apps available.  It is amazing to see how much apps have changed our lives since 2008.  With this amazing growth and some major competition you have to wonder what the future holds for this relatively new technology.

On The GoWARE provides mobile app development and training services for Apple iPhone, iPad, Google Android, and BlackBerry platforms.