The Android Market hit a milestone over the holiday weekend - it now contains over 400,000 apps, putting it only 100,000 apps behind Apple's App Store in terms of sheer quantity. What's even more impressive, though, is that the Market is now the largest store in the world for free apps, with a whopping 68 percent of its collection available sans price tag.
Sure, that is great for consumers, but there's no denying the dark side of free software: it generates less revenue than its paid counterpart. While 65% of the Android Market's revenue comes from apps using the freemium model, the App Store generates four times the income of the Android Market, as less than half of its available apps are free.
That aside, it's still quite interesting to see the growth rate of the Android Market compared to the App Store. It took the App Store a mere 22 months to reach the 200,000 application milestone, while the Market took 31 months to reach the same goal. It has been all uphill from there for our green mascot, however, as it only took four months to hit 300k (the App Store took double that time frame), and four more months to get to 400k (the App Store took seven). In a nutshell, the Android Market garnered twice the amount of new apps as the App Store in the same amount of time.
Not bad.