I think this is a fallacy. It was created by Apple. Google got involved in furthering it as they neared App parity with iOS. Tech media pundits hammer on this point and users keep saying it. That doesn't make it true or even a majority opinion. I hear few users (outside of these sorts of stilted forum discussions) boasting how many Apps they have on their phone and how many are available for install.
It's a matter of perspective and also one of deception. Apps feed into UX, but not necessarily as the main component. Who stays with a mobile OS that makes them miserable just because it has so many Apps? Now... being heavily invested in an ecosystem makes a bigger difference. It becomes burdensome to move all your data, cloud backup, media and settings... Agreed. But actual App count in a store? How many Apps can you use in a day? In a week? In a month? How many Apps are downloaded and quickly forgotten? Or uninstalled because they really don't accomplish what the user wants? Or behave as desired?
Use as many Apps as you can for a whole year... Go ahead. Start alphabetically. In a year you wouldn't use more than a fraction of the 1,375,751 Apps on Google Play
*.
"Apps carry a higher amount of weight than anything else," may work as a personal statement for some, but not as a generalization.
@jonnaver - How many of your phone purchase decisions have honestly been driven by App count or need for one specialized App? I talk to people about phones all the time, I rarely hear about such a thing... Statistically, from my unscientific sample, it is way less than 10%.
App quantity or need for one particular App has never defined what phone or tablet purchase I've made. Overall User eXperience (UX) has always been a deciding factor and let the App situation fall where it may...
App quantity as a driving force for mobile device purchase makes little sense in the long term. "I hate this device, but man, I have like twenty seven file managers on this bad boy!" Really? Is that how consumers determine where they spend significant amounts of money? Tech is not cheap. Unless you are a tech journalist that gets handed devices for free all the time, App parity is probably not the number one priority on your shopping list. UX and enjoyability, reliability and hardware spec; these make more fiscal sense as determining factors. I for one don't want to plunk down hundreds of dollars on something I hate navigating around on and which holds little aesthetic value for me in terms of interface. You can throw as many free versions of Angry Birds as you want on top of a mess and it won't sway me one bit...
For good measure, here's a recent breakdown;
Smartphones: So Many Apps, So Much Time showing the average number of Apps installed on a phone and the narrow focus of what most App use accomplishes. Sort of puts a real world minimization on how important Apps actually are to most users.
*Updated 24 Sept, 2014:
Number of available Android applications - AppBrain