
Ask HN: Why are there so many apps? - miguelrochefort
There are millions of apps. Thousands of new ones get released every day.<p>I probably use 10 different messaging apps on a weekly basis.<p>Every car, appliance, city, school, bank, grocery store, airline, festival, celebrity, have their own apps.<p>I worked in mobile application development for the past 5 years. I know how much it costs to build even the simplest application.<p>Why are there so many apps? How is this sustainable? Why didn&#x27;t anyone come up with a better solution? Why is nobody talking about this?
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greenyoda
> Why are there so many apps?

An app allows a company to stick their logo (as an icon) on the customer's
phone, where they'll see it constantly. It's a form of advertising.

Having an app on the customer's phone allows a company to track that person
and push messages to them.

A business might feel compelled to have an app because their competitors have
apps. They may believe that they need an app to attract the younger
generations of customers.

> How is this sustainable?

For a large company like a bank, airline, car manufacturer or grocery store
chain, hiring a few developers to build and maintain an app is a trivial
expense. They have IT departments with hundreds or thousands of employees. For
many businesses (banks, airlines, etc.) the APIs that an app would use to
access the customer's account already exist for their web sites.

Celebrities can make a huge amount of money selling products and ads on their
app (I seem to remember reading that the Kardashians made many millions of
dollars from their app).

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throwaway8879
Why are there so many of anything? How many brands of canned tuna are there?
Toilet paper? Etc. Because the market allows for it. I believe this is a good
thing. You don't want to be stuck in a situation like the former Soviet Union
where you could only find one kind of jar of pickles.

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Torwald
There are that many apps because we have so many people capable of building
apps. This probably means it has become fairly easy to build an app. Let's say
there are 70 million apps. Compared to 7 billion people, still not a lot of
apps.

