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Plethora of iOS apps keeps users around despite rollout glitches

Apple's iOS app platform is too rich for users to abandon -- at least not right away, says a Taipei-based analyst.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers

It's the apps, stupid.

Users will stick with iOS because of the abundance of apps despite problems with the rollout of iOS 6, said a Taipei-based analyst.

A rocky introduction of new in-house apps such as Maps and Siri nothwithstanding, users will stick with iOS because they "have already bought so many mobile apps and music on the iOS platform that it would be hard for them to switch to other devices running on the Android or Windows operating systems," said Simon Yang, an analyst at the Topology Research Institute, speaking in Monday's China Post.

Yang was addressing the Taiwan market, but this argument could easily apply to other markets like the U.S. where there's been a wide range of complaints about iOS 6 including Apple's maps app and Wi-Fi connectivity.

And there is evidence that concerns about the map app, for example, are simply driving users to iOS map alternatives -- not other platforms.

There are currently north of 700,000 apps on Apple's App Store.

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