What is a swift playground?

It's an eye opening objective foreseen by Apple to provide an ultimate beginner platform for students of all categories , toddlers and also adults to engage in the world of app designing, development , debugging, and publishing into the App Store with due support for Xcode .

It was introduced by Apple in WWDC 2016 in order to boost the number of apps available in the App Store.

This statistic contains data on the number of apps available for download in leading app stores as of June 2016. As of that month, Android users were able to choose between 2.2 million apps. Apple's App Store remained the second-largest app store with 2 million available apps.

In 2015, the global mobile internet user penetration has exceeded half the world’s population, while the average daily time spent accessing online content from a mobile device, such as a smartphone, a tablet computer or wearable, has reached 3.26 hours daily among youths. Accounting for this popularity is also the growing creation and use applications (shortened to simply apps) – computer programs adapted for mobile use and focused on an extremely wide array of purposes, from gaming to weight loss apps and from mobile messengers to animation software.

Currently, the two largest global platforms for app distribution are Apple’s App Store, which caters to iOS users, and Google Play, belonging to the eponymous company, which is the official app store for the Android OS. 

The fact that mobile apps are relatively easier to create than computer apps, as well as their considerable lower price has translated into a growing industry which produces every year more and more. In fact, it is impossible to know exactly how many apps are there, but, as of November 2015 there were some 1.8 million apps in Google Play alone, 200 thousand more than in July of the same year. The Apple Store, on the other hand, had gone from 800 apps in July 2008 , the month of its launch, to 1.5 million in June 2015. Apple estimates that, by June 2015, apps from the Apple App Store were downloaded a cumulative 100 billion times. However, statistics show that many downloaded apps are not used more than once in the first six months. The most popular Apple App Store category is gaming with about 23 percent of available apps belonging to this category.  

Applications generate revenue in a number of different ways, such as charging users a small amount of money for the use of an app (an average of 1.02 U.S. dollars per app in the Apple Store), charging for access to premium features of an otherwise free app or simply selling ad space. In 2015, Google Play generated an estimated 6 billion U.S. dollars in revenues.