App Ecosystems
We’ll start with a question: How many posts a year do you see about app store A with X apps and Y downloads? I reckon it’ll be 50+ total. The problem with this is that none of those posts give a metric that shows the real health of the application ecosystem for those devices. If there were some way to see an app store’s quality pickings in comparison to it’s bloat items, we could rank the markets properly.
To qualify as a quality app, we’d have to have an average rating higher than 4.5 and at least 100 reviews to make sure it isn’t horribly skewed by outliers. You could take that number alone and rank the application markets, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Over saturation of a market also plays a part in how desirable a market is. Measure over saturation as the percentage of all apps on that store that aren’t deemed quality apps.
When it’s not hard to come up those extra quality identifiers of an app store, why don’t the journalists work on analyzing app stores how they really should be? Quality over Quantity, as the saying goes.
