(The Economist) — SOME fight wars with words, others with numbers. Hardly a day passes without new data on mobile apps, the small applications that can be downloaded to smart-phones to perform all kinds of feats, such as accessing social networks, playing games and identifying unknown music. Apple recently announced that its App Store now offers 225,000 apps, which collectively have been downloaded 5 billion times. Android Market, the storefront for the operating system that powers many other smart-phones, now boasts 60,000 apps and is catching up fast. And GetJar, an independent mobile store that offers programs for all kinds of handsets, claims 72,000 apps and 1 billion downloads.
