I just found an interesting article analyzing why there's so much apps on application stores of concurrent phones (iPhone and Android), mostly by having hundreds or thousands of app when for the same thing we only need one app (one app for all RSS feeds, one app to read all e-books, ...).

Less is more: the 200′000 apps myth

After reading this article, I think I couldn't agree more. The problem is most of people dumbly look at how many app there is when comparing smartphones, but this number does not reflect how powerfull a platform/smartphone is.

How can Nokia/Maemo(Meego) adapt his communication strategy to break this apps myth and show the weakness of iPhone/Android compared to Maemo/Meego ?

By making meego feature complete out of the box,
the more it can do out of the box in its factory state the less reliance there is on 200k of garbage apps.
they need good social networking, media player, Email, maps, photo browser and very good video/photo editing software. these things need to be there from the moment you open the box and need to be done well, average app set will not cut like with some of the ones on n900

EDIT: on the other hand nokias future strategy with apps seems to be in the mold of adroid/iphone but on a far bigger scale with there multiplatform Qt SDK, so its no good trying to show the weakness of competitors when the future for themselves is the same, its all money driven of course not quality driven

I think the average user does not know enough to judge and therefore they rely on parameters as apps number which is definetely missleading.

Probably what NvyUs says is correct but still not enough.

You are talking about installing external app for navigation, mms, use of internal hardware not implemented in OS (like radio receiver, for example), and such things?
Yeah, how can they compare to Maemo...

Oh so true... maybe they should focus on telling it like it is... Like with the e-book reader or RSS feeds... "One app. to read them all" type of thing :-P
gPodder, FBReader and CbrPager are amongst my favorite apps.

Nokia is already working to remedy the issue... by creating an RSS app wizard

Unfortunately, that's probably necessary. But if we're to take the advertising requirement seriously without compromising quality and putting individual books in the app manager, I can think of a few things for Nokia to do:

-Include the full set of Unix utilities with MeeGo and count them as individual apps. (This isn't even bs, just something that wouldn't normally be done.)

-Port KDE and count all desktop apps, instead of just the ones that are light enough. The heavy ones might still be useful to someone, just like the 2000 RSS apps...

-Add KIO Slave support to the file dialogs, but count every protocol as an individual app. (This is a feature I would really like anyway.)

-Create widgets for streams of every possible data type and count them as individual apps.

This is true on all platforms... there's always going to be some redundancy - in the case of the iTunes Music Store, the redundancy is incredible.

Even on the N810 or N900, I could use: Evince, Kchmviewer, PDF Reader, FBReader, or other apps to read PDF files. Or for weather, there's OMWeather and Foreca. Browsers... Opera, Fennec, Mindfield, Arora, Midori, Tear.

You get my point. Each and every one of these stores inflate their numbers by just counting the heads, not by counting where they overlap. If there's an app that does what you need, then use it. Cool part... if there's an app you need on Maemo/MeeGo, develop it.

I'll just use what suits my needs no matter the platform. The rest of those numbers mean nothing to me.

i agreeeeeeeeee totallyyyyyyyyyy

The problem is, this sort of calculation will be present in any app stores. It's not an intentionally inflated numbers for marketing purpose.

What the hundreds of thousands of apps DO show is a thriving third party application ecosystem.

Having 10, 20, or 100 apps that do the same thing gives the user multiple choices - perhaps one does it better, or is cheaper, or faster, or uses less battery, or whatever.

So on the one hand, indeed in order to accomplish function X you only need one application (or even a part of a full featured application) to accomplish task Y, if you have a choice of several apps you (as a user) feel empowered by choice. You (as a developer) can dog-pile onto whatever the hot "function" is this week and try to make money. You (as a device manufacture) can proudly point to your app store/market place/software catalog and say "this is a thriving platform with lots of choices for users, and lots of ways for developers to make money."

And like it or not, that's the world we live in.