Apple Raises App Limit To 180 Apps

The iPhone 3.0 software upgrade will allow iPhone users to have 180 applications installed on the device at any given time.  This equates to 11 pages of apps.  The previous app limit was 148 (9 pages of apps).  There is one small problem with all of these limits, Apple boasts that the App Store currently has 50,000 apps in it and growing.  What does that mean to you and me though?  Well, lets do some quick math.

Based on the current limitations you can only have 0.36% of all the apps in the App Store on your iPhone/iPod Touch at any given time.  Now, lets assume that all of the 50k apps in the App Store are 1MB/each (this is not true, but go with me on this) that would be 1MB * 50k which is approximately 46GB.  Granted the iPhone and iPod Touch are currently limited to 32GB it wouldn’t be possible to have every single on your device at once, but, nonetheless, why the limit?

The only reason I can think of for this limit is performance or rather, performance being hindered. The latest iPhone 3G S release comes in 16GB and 32GB models and seems to be quite the speed demon, however, the previous two iPhone’s are not up to par with the 3G S. While I did notice a speed increase when I updated my iPhone 3G to the 3.0 software I’m betting that the 180 limit is because of the older iPhone’s. I think the new iPhone (3G S) can mostly likely handle more than 180 apps being installed at any given time but the older devices are holding it back.

Apple would be saving themselves a lot of trouble (and headaches) by having the same limit on all the devices for a number of reasons (a.) it keeps the device running at what Apple considers to be “acceptable” performance (b.) if there were multiple versions of iPhone 3.0 many people would try and run the version which provided the higher app limit and therefore would totally destroy the whole point of point (a.) and (c.) poor performing iPhone’s or iPod Touch’s could lead to a negative image which could potentially be taken advantage of by Palm, Microsoft, or any number of companies.