App Store downloads approach 30 billion

The world divides in a number of ways. Popular divisions include “Ah yes, I remember a time before the video recorder had been invented” as well as “Sorry, what's a tape?” – alongside “Liverpool can't seem to end the season without winning the championship” to “Nope – never won it – not in my lifetime”.

You get the picture.

KitGuru wonders how significant The App Store will be when history is/was written.

‘Apps' is short for applications which means programs. Apps is the generic term we use for programs that will run on smaller Apple devices, including the iPhone, iPod and iPad. They are all ‘certified' by Apple and available for download from The App Store.

At the time of writing, there are now close to 600,000 Apps available for download. That's quite a selection.

While many of them will work on any device, the number of ‘native iPad Apps' is now approaching 200,000 – and that number is rising rapidly. Being in charge of such an increasingly popular product is a marketing man's wet dream.

In this instance, the wet dream was specifically visualised by Eddu Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. When the 25th Billion App was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China, Apple stepped in with a $10,000 iTunes gift card. The app that was downloaded to win the prize was a freebie called “Where's My Water?”

Overjoyed, Apple's Eddy announced “We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded. When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users”.

So why has it all proven so popular?

Well, for consumers, it's the chance to spend (on average) less than £1 to buy a mini-application that they want to begin enjoying instantly and for developers, it's the knowledge that a cool new App can earn a shed load of 25% commissions – without costing millions to develop.

So far, the Apple App Store has already paid out a huge amount and the ‘5 Billionth Dollar' will be issued to a developer soon enough. Nice.

KitGuru says: Remember a world without an App Store? Nope? Well around 500,000 babies are born each day, pretty soon there will be over 1 billion people on the planet who have never known a ‘time without Apps'.  Impressive.

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