Google Play now has 600,000 apps

Amidst all the furore created around the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update and the Nexus 7 tablet at Google’s annual I/O keynote, you could be forgiven for overlooking the event’s other announcements.

Sure, it’s not exactly the revelation of some new and exciting Google product, but the news that Android now contains 600,000 apps on Google Play is a huge landmark for the company.

It was only a few months ago that figures showed Google Play to have around 450,000 apps, a fair old distance behind Apple’s App Store, which has 650,000 apps. With the new figures, it seems that Google have rapidly closed the gap on Apple, and at this rate could well overtake their rivals’ popularity.

Of course, Google Play is much less controlled than the App Store, so there are a lot of apps out there that are pretty useless, and some even that are scams intended to breach your personal security. These amount to a minority of what Google Play has to offer though, and do little to taint what’s become a high-quality app market.

It’s suspected though that Google lag behind the App Store is in tablet-oriented apps. Google mentioned nothing about how many of their apps are tailored to tablets, while Apple boast 225,000 iPad-oriented apps.

[Source: Engadget]