While Apple and Google can brag of hundreds of thousands of apps in their respective app stores, BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) is only just now launching its BlackBerry 10 app store. Along with the announcements of the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones, the Z10 and the Q10, BlackBerry today announced that it now has 70,000 apps in its BlackBerry World app store.
The company claims it will launch with over 1000 of the “top applications” on smartphones. It name-dropped several big-name apps, including Skype, Amazon’s Kindle app, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The app store will also have a limited selection of games highlighted by Fruit Ninja and the Angry Birds games, including Angry Birds Star Wars. The app store has a fairly solid launch line-up of apps, and includes most of the major social and news apps.
Though 70,000 apps is a testament to BlackBerry’s developer outreach and its efforts at making BlackBerry 10 ports simple to create, that number is still less than one one-hundredth of the number of apps that can be found in the Apple App Store or Google Play. If BlackBerry 10 is to be the product that turns around RIM’s BlackBerry’s fortunes, the company will have continue to lure compelling software to its platform.