Google: Android Market now serving 30,000 apps

At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it’s no wonder that the size of the Android Market is quickly increasing in its slipstream.

While Google doesn’t publicly show how many applications there are in Android Market, a Google representative this morning informed me that the application store now serves approximately 30,000 free and paid apps in total.

The application store for Android devices supposedly hit the 10,000 apps milestone in September 2009 according to third-party developer AndroLib, who later also claimed that number doubled in just over 3 months.

Google at the time matched these claimed stats against its own count, and said there were in reality some 16,000 apps in Android Market in December 2009. Yesterday, I asked Google for an update to those internal stats after I noticed AndroLib currently pegs the number of apps at nearly 35,000, and this morning the company got back to me saying there are now officially 30,000 apps in the Android Market. In other words, Google says the number grew from 16k to 30k apps in exactly three months.

The company declines to detail what percentage of apps in Android Market are paid versus free, but for what it’s worth, AndroLib says the ratio is about 39% paid vs. 61% free of charge.

Just for comparison’ sake: Apple counted over 140,000 apps in the App Store in January 2010, so it’s safe to assume there should be about 5 times as many apps for the iPhone and iPod touch as there are for Android devices right about now.

Research agency research2guidance recently released a report forecasting that the total app download market could grow to a whopping $15 billion by 2013.