How Many Android Tablet Apps Are There?

In my Times column this week, I reviewed Hewlett-Packard’s new iPad clone, the TouchPad. Since the benefit of owning a tablet is apps, I thought it would be useful to compare the number of apps available for iPad, Android tablets and the new H.P.

It was easy to find out the number of apps available for the iPad: 90,000, not counting the 475,000 apps for the iPhone that also run on the iPad (at lower screen resolution). Apple doesn’t make any effort to hide these statistics.

H.P. told me how many apps it had on Day 1 of its tablet, too: 300. That’s not many, but the TouchPad product manager pointed out that it was already more than Android tablets had on their Day 1. (Can’t the TouchPad also run the 8,000 apps available for the Palm Pre, since it supposedly runs the same WebOS operating system? Unfortunately, only about 70 percent of them work on the tablet — and you can’t blow up that small image to fill the tablet’s larger screen, as you can on iPad and Android tablets.)

To complete my roundup, all I had to do was investigate how many Android tablet apps there are. And that turned out to be incredibly difficult.

Google, for its part, was of no help. Its public relations people simply don’t want to say how many tablet apps there are.

I tried looking on the Android app store. But I couldn’t find any way to see a list of apps that are just for tablets, unless the “Featured Android Apps for Tablets” list is it. If so, the total tally is 100 apps.

I asked on Twitter; my followers there have never let me down on a quest for information. And they tried valiantly to help me.

One pointed me to this Updated List of Android Apps for Honeycomb, but it didn’t seem very updated. Total tally: 50 apps. (Honeycomb is the name for the latest version of Google’s Android operating system for tablets.)

Others suggested AndroLib and AppBrain, sites that seems to specialize in Android app statistics. The one I needed, though, didn’t seem to be there.

Another follower recommended a research site called Distimo.com, whose tag line is, “Providing valuable insight into the app store market.” I e-mailed its press contact, who was nice enough to get back to me promptly with this answer:

“As of May 2011, there were 174 applications that were exclusively available for Android Honeycomb 3.0. Please note that the number of applications optimized for Honeycomb will be higher, as we currently can not identify applications that are available for both phones < = 2.2 and Honeycomb (3.0).” Total tally: at least 174.

(“For comparison purposes,” she added, “the Apple App Store for iPad holds 90,380 iPad optimized applications, of which 50,409 are optimized for both iPhone and iPad,” as of May 2011.)

Another Twitter follower, suggested using Google’s “search within a site” syntax, like this: "site:market.android.com tablet.” This technique produced a much larger list. Total tally: more than 3,000 apps! That didn’t seem right.

In the end, the most reliable and current listing I found was in the forums of AndroidCentral.com, a site that would certainly seem to know. There, on the “officially official ‘Optimized for Honeycomb’ apps list,” the Total Tally is 232 apps. That’s the number I used in my column.

Clearly, part of the problem is: what’s a tablet app? I know enough to distinguish between “Android phone apps that run on tablets too” and “just for tablets.” But there must be other distinctions. For example, AndroidCentral’s list obviously includes only apps designed for Honeycomb, which is the tablet-only version of Android. There’s presumably some other set of apps that run on Honeycomb and previous versions of Android — whose screen resolution is optimized for tablets.

This article, “How to Find Android Tablet Apps,” makes the same point — that it’s hard to define what, exactly, defines “optimized for tablets.”

Furthermore, there are apps that run only on the Samsung Galaxy, some that run only on the Motorola Xoom, and so on. (This, as I’ve often pointed out, is the glaring downside of Android’s openness: it’s not really one platform, but a splintered mishmash of different versions.)

In any case, I now understand why Google’s PR folks do not want the total tally publicized. However you count the apps, the total tally today is a fairly low number.