While raw app numbers can be impressive--and boost the credibility of the catch phrase "there's an app for that"--the fact is that the number of bread-and-butter apps in an app store is in the ballpark of about two-dozen. For example, pollster Nielsen found that Android users spent 43 percent of their time with the top 10 apps in that market. Furthermore, they spent 61 percent of their time with the top 50 apps, .

So if only a few number of apps are actually used by users, why all the posturing about "my store has more apps than your store?" From a marketing point of view, "more" is almost as attractive as "new" to technology consumers--even if the more is more of the same. For example, PCWorld's app expert, Armando Rodriguez, says that more than 900 Solitaire game apps have been written for the iPhone and 1200 for Android.

[Read: ]

"If you were to remove all the copycat apps, you would probably end up with around the same number of apps currently available on Windows Phone 7 (30,000), which is a huge difference in terms of app variety," . "That's not to say that the WP7 platform doesn't suffer from duplicates. It does--just not on the same scale as Android and iOS."