Given how much care Apple usually puts into its products, and especially into the small details, it’s amazing that the App Store’s ability to count is worse than Sesame Street’s resident vampire after a full-frontal lobotomy.

The iPhone’s App Store app is terrible at doing this, regularly flagging a certain number of updates and getting the total wrong. But iTunes is even worse. The Applications sidebar item will cheerily tell you about new app updates, you’ll click it, and you’ll then be told no updates are available. Cleverly, the Applications icon won’t then update, sticking to its guns that there are updates to be had, despite the fact there clearly aren’t.

This morning, the farce was in full swing. “One app update,” exclaimed the Applications item. I click it. There are six items ready for download. Duly downloaded, the App Store happily tells me there are no more updates. Inexplicably, the Applications item now claims there are two apps ready for download.

This probably sounds needlessly picky (and, to some extent, it is), given that no other company has come close to emulating the App Store (and, frankly, I think few will, even in the long term). But it’s hard to always sing the App Store’s praises when the damn thing can’t even count.

UPDATE: Purely by chance, I today discovered that this ‘quirk’ is down to there being multiple accounts on my Mac. Although one account was up to date, another had apps ready for download. Of course, iTunes doesn’t actually bother telling you this might be the case, and so it’s still a black mark for Apple, for an unusually unintuitive UI decision.

iTunes counting

So, do I have two downloads ready or none at all, App Store? TELL ME!