In a short but sweet twitter message posted a couple of hours ago, Google announced that the Android Marketplace has now managed to contain over 100,000 apps, something many analysts expected would happen in August. The message simply said "One hundred thousand apps in Android Market." This puts Google"s Android Marketplace in a great position to potential handset customers.
Google still finds itself way behind Apple"s iTunes App Store though, which now has well over 250,000 iOS based applications online. This is still good news for Google though as they have managed to reach this milestone in just two years since they first launched the Android Marketplace to the public via the first ever Android handset, the T-Mobile G1.
Despite handset sales being even stronger than the iPhone, Google Marketplace hasn"t had the same effect that Apple has had with the iTunes App Store. Most of this falls at the feet of fragmentation caused by multiple versions of the Android Operating System being available only on select devices. For example, the HTC Tattoo and other Android phones have such low resolutions that they cannot run some basic applications that work on other Android phones.
Microsoft is far behind with its own Windows Phone Marketplace with less than 1000 applications available, but with the full American launch not coming until next month, the hope is that many new developers will be releasing content on the new devices.