Twitter Now Has One Million Registered Apps

Leslie Horn - PC Magazine

The Twitter ecosystem just continues to grow. The company announced in a blog post on Monday that there are now more than a million registered Twitter apps, up from just 150,000 apps a year ago.

Twitter said these apps are created by more than 750,000 developers, and a new app is added every 1.5 seconds. On top of that, investors have poured more than $500 million into companies involved in the ecosystem, and more than a billion dollars worth of acquisitions have been made, Twitter says. The app categories that have grown most notably are analytics, curation, and publishing tools.

Twitter also launched a new developer portal on Monday to provide better support to the ecosystem. Launched using Drupal, the new dev.twitter.com features discussions, a developer blog, more user-friendly documents, an improved apps manager, and enhanced search.

Despite the impressive growth the ecosystem has had in the past year, Twitter's relationship with the third-party developer community hasn't always been smooth sailing. In March, Twitter's director of platform Ryan Sarver told developers to stop making apps that "mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience," undercutting some of the competition that comes from these third-party devs.

Recently, Twitter has made several moves that indicate it could be attempting to create different aspects of the ecosystem itself. Twitter started making its own official app last spring after it acquired iPhone client Tweetie. Earlier this year, Twitter bought TweetDeck, which was previously the number one app created by a company other than Twitter. Last week, Twitter announced that it had snapped up social analytics company BackType. There has been speculation in the past that Twitter would build its own analytics tool, and this recent acquisition could suggest that there's truth to that rumor.

Aside from predictions about Twitter's plans for the future of the space, the company says app developers are key to "helping people get the best out of Twitter."