Apple announced today that there are now over 100,000 applications available in its iTunes App Store.
"The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating."
"The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve," said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. "With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers."
"With 10,000 downloads a day, worldwide customer response to our I Am T-Pain App has exceeded our wildest expectations," said Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule. "The App Store has given us a unique opportunity to create and grow a very successful business, and we're looking forward to an exciting future."
100,000 apps is a ton of applications but many of them are overlooked. ReadWriteWeb reports that data from Appsfire indicates that only about 20,000 of the apps in Apple's App Store are actually being used.
With so many apps available - an abundance of riches - it could get overwhelming for iPhone and iPod Touch users. GigaOm says the next thing for Apple to do with its store is to "focus on the discoverability of the applications." Apple does need to help its users find high quality apps and ignore silly ones that have little purpose or value.
Tidbits lists numbers from the app stores for different smartphones here. The Android app store is the closest to Apple's App Store with 10,000 apps.
You can find more discussion of Apple's growing App Store here on Techmeme.
Apple 
