Apple has just logged iPhone app number 100,000 into the iTunes store - and not surprisingly, location-based services (LBS) are only sparsely represented among the huge selection of apps now available.
The reason this comes as no surprise is that none of the app stores for any smartphones carry a large percentage of LBS apps. And as testers and reviewers have found out, the number of really good LBS apps for any make of phone or mobile operating system is low indeed.
Games dominate in the Apple store. Nearly 17 percent of the titles are games. Let's see... if Apple adds no new games and you play one new game a week, there are currently enough iPhone games to keep you going for 327 years.
Entertainment, book and travel apps are next in popularity. Navigation as a category on its own makes up 2,700 iPhone apps. These will show you how to get from A to B with varying degrees of efficiency but it's not clear how many of the nav apps include full LBS. At a guess, it would seem unlikely that more than 1 percent of iPhone apps qualify as LBS.
To see how the different types of apps stock the digital shelves in the iTunes store, check this pie chart.
Another completely expected revelation is that the number of iPhone apps far outnumbers the combined total of apps for all other smartphones. However, this in itself is misleading. For instance, Robbie Bach of Microsoft says there are about 20,000 Windows Mobile apps on the market, yet Microsoft's Mobile Windows Marketplace lists only 250 of them.
The way I see it, LBS apps as a family face three problems. One, there are not that many of them. Two, of those that are available, not that many are worth having. And three, even of those that are nice to use, there are almost none which have proved to be built and marketed in accordance with solid, monetisable business models.
