Apple’s magic toy, delivered at the beginning of April has been around for a bit more than 2 months but the amount of apps displayed at the App Store has already topped 10 000 titles. The average speed of replenishing the apps reserve is about 1,000 new products of iPad developers‘ creative minds being added every week.

Around 78% of iPad specific titles are paid apps, which means iPad users are eager to pay for the premium content. Some analysts estimate that the growth of the iPad apps library has outpaced the original iPhone App Store saying nothing about the Android market. It took iPhone about 5 months to hit the same target, while Android reached the milestone only 11 months since the release. It’s quite a sad comparison for Android as the store has no approval process or some quality control issues.

Again, no doubt, that the current research figures contain some overestimation and iPad apps figures are including both original iPad apps and those ported from the iPhone. In general, the idea of porting is quite nice, as developers choose the most popular apps that are sure to appeal to front-end consumers and adjust them to the iPad technical characteristics.

Some users however are not satisfied with the results. The most popular complain is that iTunes does not have the ability to distinguish which app is universal, iPhone specific or iPad specific, which quite often leads to downloading horrible apps with pixellated texts when they are zoomed. Another iTunes’s drawback is a very poor and illogic way of presenting apps at the store, really great apps being hard to find as instead of scrolling through all of the games (for example), a user has to deal with a special Apple organization scheme of a range of tabs such as “Top Paid”, “Top Free” or something like “What’s Hot”.

Another issue that iPad users tend to grumble at are a higher app price. In general, iPad apps are priced higher than their iPhone versions. Some developers may be charging more to recoup some money they did not manage to get selling their iPhone versions. Some analysts’ observations that iPad users are ready to pay more are just nonsense. Nobody likes overpaying and it seems that true Apple fans are extremely unsatisfied with the quality of the iPad apps that have already been approved at the App Store and require more strict control procedures. So, lack of freedom which is a disturbing Apple’s issue, definitely is not their problem. What worries them most is an insufficient control from the company’s side which allows apps they do not like.