Apple chalk up 40 billion app downloads

Apple customers have downloaded more than 40 billion applications since their App Store opened in July 2008. Half of those downloads happened in 2012.

Jobs was initially reluctant to allow third party developers into the App Store. His style was always to ‘lock' everything down, a growth problem for the Apple computers in the early days, as they were so expensive and could not be built by home brew modders.

In the end Jobs took advise from some colleagues, and the rest as they say, is history.

Apple have over 500 million active App Store accounts, compared to 188 million Amazon active customer accounts. The Apple developer community has written more than 775,000 applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Apple have had to pay out $7 billion in payments for contributions.

Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services said “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.”

Apple are said to keep 30 percent of all App revenue for themselves, therefore of the $7 billion they paid developers, they would have made $3 billion for themselves.

When a developer gets it right, the rewards are immense. Keith Shepherd the co-founder of Imangi Studios who released Temple Run said “The success of our game Temple Run in 2012 was nothing short of astonishing. We were simply looking to create a game that was fun and easy to play, but once it hit the App Store, the game took off. This past year, we saw more than 75 million downloads of Temple Run on iOS.”

They received 750,000 downloads and made millions in profit for the game.

Research first Analytics have said that they expect more than 1 billion applications to be downloaded between iOS and Android each week in the first three quarters of 2013 and then it will increase to 2 billion apps per day.

Kitguru says: It is certainly a nice revenue stream for the Cupertino company.

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