Apple and Google often brag on the fact that their app stores, viz. the Apple App Store and the Android Market, have more than 350,000 and 250,000 apps respectively, but the number of apps in an app store doesn't matter.

Two separate Nielsen studies suggest that people don't care how many apps does a app store has and that people are downloading the same apps across all leading mobile platforms and using the same ones for long periods of time.

According to the findings, apps like Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Angry Birds, and the Weather Channel, are being downloaded on different platforms such as Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone 7.

The findings also revealed that users of Android devices spend 43 per cent of their app time using apps from the top 10 and 61 per cent of time on apps in the top 50.

Consumers do download other apps, but the number of apps out of the top fifty is very small, plus additional apps aren’t used nearly as much. Thus, the availability of hundreds of thousands of other apps in the app store is not as great as it seems.

Nielsen suggests that one shouldn’t base one’s decision to purchase a new smartphone or tablet solely around how many apps are available for their OS.