It's the software, stupid: Would-be iPad killers marred with just 17 tablet apps

Dying to compete with iPad, rivals are drumming up speeds and feeds in the absence of quality software. Unfortunately for them, the game is software, not hardware. Blogger Justin Williams took time to sort through Android Market and count apps that are featured for Android slates. How many did he count? Just seventeen apps.

My criteria for considering an app for this list is that it either requires Android 3.0 or have its user interface be specifically designed for a tablet experience. I didn’t count games or existing Android apps that are just upconverted to take advantage of the existing screen real estate. Based on my criteria, I found 20 apps in the Android Marketplace for the Motorola Xoom.

Apple’s first mover advantage with iPad is bearing fruits. A year since its release developers have written more than 65,000 apps that specifically take advantage of the iPad. This excludes iPhone apps that pixel-double to the tablet’s 9.7-inch 1024-by-768 display. Steve Jobs took a crack at Android’s app count at the iPad 2 unveiling:

That compares to our competitors, who are trying to launch these days with at most 100 apps. And I think we’re being a little generous here. This is a huge advantage we have.

Apple’s rivals should pause and seriously ponder over Apple’s numbers a bit. The company sold nearly 15 million iPads over nine months, “more than any tablet PC ever sold,” as Jobs put it. The tablet grabbed over 90 percent market share in 2010 and generating over ten billion dollars in revenue for Apple. Jobs also stressed his company shipped a hundred millionth iPhone, has over 200 million accounts on the iTunes Store with credit cards enabled for one-click purchasing and recently paid out over two billion dollars to the developers cumulatively, in total – and that’s after Apple’s 30 percent cut.