Lilbits (8-22-2013): More than a third of BlackBerry 10 apps come from a single developer

Folks have a habit of comparing mobile platforms by the sheer number of apps available in their app stores. There are around a million apps available for Android and iOS, for instance, more than 160,000 available for Windows Phone, and about 120,000 for BlackBerry 10.

But quality is more important than quantity — nobody actually installs a billion apps on their phone. What users really want to know is whether the key apps they want are available.

Odds are that the platform with the most apps will also have some of the best — but it turns out the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

For instance, it turns out that 48,000 of those 120,000 BlackBerry 10 apps actually come from a single developer. A small number of S4BB’s apps are actually useful. Many are exciting tools such as Mega Burp, which plays the sound of a burp, Mega Shaver, which plays the sound of an electric razer, and Flip Coin, which can randomly generate a heads or tails.

 BerryReview recently pointed out that S4BB’s apps seem to dominate the BlackBerry World store, and in an official statement, the folks at BlackBerry seem to suggest that there’s no problem with that.

Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.

• More than a third of all BlackBerry World’s 120,000 apps come from one developer, BlackBerry seems cool with that
  There are 120,000 apps in the BlackBerry World store. 48,000 come from a single developer. Some are decent apps. Most aren’t. BlackBerry’s official response is that the company is focused on helping people discover the good apps. [WSJ]
• Chrome 30 beta for Android brings WebGL , DeviceMotino Events and more
  Chrome 30 beta brings new features for desktop and mobile, including support for WebGL 2D and 3D graphics on Android and the ability to search Google by image by long-pressing any image and selecting the search option. [Google]
• Media streaming company Orb Networks is shutting down after being acquired by Qualcomm
  Orb has been making software for years that lets you stream your content over the internet, including software and hardware devices. My favorite was basically a Slingbox without the box app that you could run on a PC. Now it looks like that’s all coming to an end. [Engadget]
• XBMC for the Wandboard (Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 dev board)
  The list of devices that don’t run the XBMC media center app is starting to look shorter than the list of products that do run it. [WandBoard]
• Iteaduino Plus: $59 Allwinner A10 board with Arduino-compatile headers
  Another day, another cheap dev board that can run Linux. [CNX Software]
• CoreOS is a Chrome OS-based operating system designed for web servers
  Most internet servers run on Linux. Now a team wants to use a modified version of Chrome OS (which also, happens to be based on Linux). The key features include the ability to update core components without a reboot. [Wired]

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