How big has the iTunes App Store for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch become? Lets talks numbers. In the first 12 months of its existence over 1.5bn applications have been downloaded by customers from the App Store!
The number of apps available from the App Store is also growing on a daily basis. There are now over 65,000 apps available for download with over 100,00 developers registered with the iPhone Developer Program.
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. This may sound cocky but it is also quite a realistic assessment of the mobile apps market.
RIM has gone the app store route with Blackberry World while Nokia has the Ovi Store and Palm has its own version too but the momentum needed to catch up to Apple will be colossal as Apple has already shipped 40m devices – between the iPhone and iPod touch – that run App Store applications.
By Marie Boran