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App Store Freshness

David Smith has a great analysis of the “freshness” of apps on the App Store – data about when apps were last updated, for both Top Charts and the entire App Store.

For a very long time I’ve talked about my concerns about the size and health of the iOS App Store catalog. The App Store currently sits around 1,200,000 apps. For years the depth and diversity of the App Store has been one of the platforms strongest differentiators. However, as it grows the challenge becomes ensuring that it doesn’t begin to strain under its own size.

What has always annoyed me in my discussions about how to improve the App Store was that I didn’t have actual data on the composition of the App Store. Since it wasn’t (to my knowledge) available I started working out ways to get at it myself.

The numbers about the size of the App Store in relation to updates and the release of iOS 7 last year are surprising to me, as I was expecting a much worse scenario. The charts in David’s post clearly show a developer interest in updating for iOS 7 – make sure to check out the charts.