Apple: 1.5 Billion Apps Downloaded in the First Year

News
By Jane McEntegart
published

We all know that Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been hugely successful but many are eager to hear just how successful. In other words, we want numbers.

On Saturday, the App Store turned one year old and we reminisced about all the ups and downs of its first year, including how it brought in $30 million in its first 30 days of service. At the time, Steve Jobs said that it was earning $1 million a day and that he could see profits from the App Store hitting half a billion in the not to distant future.

"This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon. Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time," said Jobs, estimating the store would grow at an alarmingly fast rate.

Unfortunately we don't quite know how much the App Store is making these days, but we do know how many downloads the App Store saw in it first 12 months. Apple previously announced that after 9 months, the store had seen 1 billion downloads. This week, the Cupertino-based company announced that since then, users have downloaded a further half a billion applications.

Apple said yesterday that there are over 65,000 apps available in the store. CEO Steve Jobs took a jab at competitors yesterday in a press release:

"The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."

Jane McEntegart
9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Hanin33
    65k apps... really? so you're saying 10 unique apps and 64,990 clones or totally useless crap? even in the world of Windows... 65k applications is insane...
    Reply
  • zak_mckraken
    65k apps is not that hard to reach when you have high quality products to get in the store. Like Baby shaker, Slasher, Obama!, etc.
    Reply
  • the_one111
    zak_mckraken65k apps is not that hard to reach when you have high quality products to get in the store. Like Baby shaker, Slasher, Obama!, etc.Who could forget iPorn?
    Reply
  • thefactsplease
    Please change the title of the article to 1.5 billion downloaded. Sold implies the app actually had a price tag. Apple has only reported number of downloaded apps not "sold apps" and not total revenue from "sold apps".
    Reply
  • matt87_50
    pfft, just like everything else with apple, they are controlling the statistics massively! if they released all stats for all apps we would see things like 1.4bil of those apps were fart apps, or something that should have been BUILT INTO the phone when launched.

    the reason there are so many apps downloaded is cause there are so many free ones - which nobody makes a cent off of - and the reason they make so much money is from all the ppl paying the exorbitant $100 dev fee.
    Reply
  • gjelly
    So the best insult you guys can come up with is that there are too many apps? Really?


    Isn't that what everyone whined about before the app store was out? People wanted to have the ability to make there own apps and they got that freedom. So now retards like you are trying to make it seem like its shitty that there are so many developers wanting to share their creations with everyone. Man it really sucks that the developer community for the iPhone is so ridiculously better than any other out there. But of course it's Apple's fault that people have made that many apps.


    You guys are brilliant. Trying to tear down an open developer community....
    Reply
  • pkellmey
    A recent report said that 1 billion of the downloads were reloads. I'm not impressed.
    Reply
  • acecombat
    Just because it's been downloaded, doesn't mean it's profit. Although I wouldn't be caught dead with an iPhone, a friend has one and all he has is free apps because he refuses to pay for useless cr@p!
    Reply
  • Bert R
    Why are you guys being down on the fact that there are free apps? Isn't that like... a good thing?
    Reply