Mac App Store Hits 10,000 Available Apps
As pointed out by MacGeneration [Google translation], Apple's Mac App Store has reached a new milestone with 10,000 apps available for purchase or free download through the marketplace. — Our own sister site AppShopper confirms the milestone …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Mac App Store opened in January 2011 and hit one million downloads on its first day; sixteen months later it has crossed 10,000 available titles, a milestone confirmed by sister site AppShopper after French outlet MacGeneration spotted it. The pickup was unusually broad for an app-count story — VentureBeat, AllThingsD, CNET, AppleInsider and Digital Trends all ran it — reflecting how closely the trade press tracks Apple's storefront metrics.
The count also matters relative to the mobile arc Fortune chronicled: the iOS App Store went from 250,000 apps in August 2010 through a disputed 300,000 claim to 500,000 by May 2011, so 10,000 reads as the Mac store being early in the same adoption curve rather than small in absolute terms.
First-order effects
- Mac developers gain a validated sales channel: a storefront that reached 10,000 apps within sixteen months of its January 2011 opening gives indie and iOS-porting developers a reason to treat OS X as a first-class target alongside iOS.
- Discovery pressure rises immediately at this scale, which puts Apple's confirmed acquisition of app-discovery service Chomp — and its shutdown of Chomp for Android — into sharper focus as infrastructure for exactly this problem.
Second-order effects
- Developers who built businesses on direct-download Mac sales face a choice between staying outside the store or accepting its review process and revenue split to reach buyers who default to storefront shopping, echoing the dynamics Fortune documented as the iOS catalog swelled.
- Rivals without a comparable curated desktop marketplace — Microsoft chief among them ahead of Windows 8 — are pressed to prove their own storefronts can attract developer supply before the Mac store compounds further.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, curated storefronts become the default distribution layer for desktop software the way they already are for mobile, shifting platform power toward whoever operates the store — Apple — and away from traditional boxed-software retail and independent download channels.
- A maturing Mac catalog also strengthens the case for converging Apple's iOS and OS X app economies, since developers increasingly maintain one codebase strategy across both stores.
The trend: Desktop software distribution is consolidating around Apple-style curated storefronts, with the Mac App Store tracing the same growth curve the iOS App Store followed two years earlier.