I'm not sure the statistics show it's quite that busted. 140,000 apps vs. 25,000 apps is sort of what you'd expect given the time advantage the iPhone had. The iPhone native app SDK was released in July 2008, to a built-in market of millions of iPhones already out there. The Android SDK was released in September 2008 (beta in August 2008), to a much smaller market of shipped devices. It wasn't until mid-2009 that Android as a platform became a serious iPhone competitor and started attracting app developers. Since then I think it's been holding its own reasonably well: I think if you looked at new apps shipped in the past 6 months, the gap would be much smaller.