85,000 Apps Later, The App Store Hits 2 Billion Downloads

Monday, September 28, 2009

Apple has just announced that the App Store has hit two billion downloads. Considering that the App Store has just been open for a little over a year, this is a tremendous accomplishment. Steve Jobs himself stated that during the third quarter alone, 500 million apps has been downloaded, reinventing what a mobile device can do.

It is just in mid-July that Apple announced the milestone for 1.5 billion app downloads. Now, just 2 months later, a new milestone is reached. With such an explosive growth, the day that Apple will reach 3 billion, 5 billion, and even 10 billion app downloads may be sooner than you think.

Apple has also announced that there are now over 85 thousand apps in the App Store for 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users all over the world. Although there are lots of apps, unfortunately, many of them are pretty much worthless or mimic the same function as other apps. Luckily, Apple has introduced some new features in the latest 3.1 OS update to help discover and manage apps. The Genius for apps should allow users to discover more useful apps and fun games based on user’s previous download history. To search for all those apps, Apple’s better app organizing and search features should help users keep track of their large library of iPhone apps.

Apple should also celebrate that iPhone users buy more paid apps than Android apps. Admob estimates that 1 out of 4 apps downloaded in the App Store has been paid. Compare that to Android’s ratio of 1 out of 8 apps, the App Store is a success just continuing to get better! Now can anyone guess which day the App store will hit 100,000 Apps available for download?

This is a post by The Apps Machine under iPhone Milestones