It’s official. Today at approximately 1:52 PM Pacific Standard Time, the Billionth application was downloaded from iTunes. And it only took 9 months. By way of comparison, it took nearly 3 years before the Billionth song was downloaded from iTunes. Granted, a good number of app store downloads are free, but that’s still damn impressive.
The Billion app milestone is incredible, but even more amazing is that app downloads on iTunes are not only increasing, they’re accelerating.
The iTunes App Store debuted on July 11, 2008. From that point on, it took Apple about 6 months to reach 500 Million app downloads. The next 500 Million downloads took only 3 months.
The last time Apple disclosed specific numbers pertaining to app store downloads was on March 17th during Apple’s special iPhone OS 3.0 Preview event. At the event, Apple announced that there had been over 800 million apps downloaded from iTunes. So in just over a month, over 200,000 more applications have been downloaded from iTunes. To put that into context, it took Apple nearly 3 and a half months to reach its first 200,000 downloaded threshold.
Whoever was lucky enough to download the billionth app will get a whole lot more than he/she bargained for as Apple is planning to give him/her a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro.
It seems to be a win win for Apple at this point. Skyrocketing iPhone and iPod Touch sales naturally increase the number of app store downloads, while the app store itself is helps to attract new iPhone and iPod Touch users.
According to Apple, the most popular paid apps of all-time include Crash Bandicoot, Koi Pond, and Enigmo. The most popular free apps of all-time include Facebook, Google Earth, and Pandora.
April 24th, 2009 at 2:58 am
They really make a lot of money then.