As of the day I'm recording this, there are not quite 2 million apps available on the Apple iOS App Store.

That's the App Store for iPhone and iPad devices primarily, though some measurements of this kind include apps for the Apple Watch, as separate from their iPhone kin.

And the numbers will get fuzzier in the near future, as Apple is in the midst of a change in their hardware

software setup, which will likely result in more crossover applications that work on both

their Mac computers and their more portable iOS devices. Those caveats in mind, though,

at the moment, there are somewhere between 1.8-ish and 1.96-ish

million apps on the iOS App Store.

And that compares to not quite 3 million, something like 2.87-ish million, to be more precise,

apps that are available in the Google Play App Store, the one that is

used by Android devices. Despite, or perhaps, in some ways, because of that app availability gap,

Apple makes quite a bit more money from their app store than Google does. After a pandemic-attributed

bump in the third quarter of

2020, Apple is expected to make about $19 billion from their app store this year, which is up 31%

from 2019 when they made about $14.5 billion. Google Play, in contrast, only brought in about 10.3 billion, which isn't nothing,

and is a more significant increase of 33.8% year on year, but still, about 50% more apps,

but about 50% less income from those apps. That paints a pretty illustrative picture of the common narrative of

the competition between these two options, namely that Apple's App Store is the far more lucrative

one, while Google's is the more expansive in terms of both users and the number of available

apps, but also the less important one in general. In terms of both users and the number of available apps,

but also the less important one in general,

in terms of earning money from an app that you might build, at least.

Which is interesting, in part because Apple didn't originally intend

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