Apple’s App Store Hits 2 Billion Downloads

When Apple first launched their “App Store”, I have to wonder if they expected it to take off so quickly. Sure, the company has sold millions of iPhone’s and iPod touch’s, but if you recall this past April, the App Store hit a staggering 1,000,000,000 (one billion!) downloads in just nine months. At that rate, downloads would have averaged at close to 4 million per day… every day. Whew, it kind of boggles the mind, huh?

Well, if you think that’s impressive, than a release the company made yesterday is even more so. Their App Store just hit the 2 billion mark, which shows that the growth in popularity of these apps isn’t slowing down at all… in fact, it’s accelerating. While it took 9 months for the first billion, it only only five for the second. Will we see 3 billion in three months… ish? Given that half of a billion have been downloaded in this quarter alone… chances are, it could happen.

Not only has the number of apps downloaded per day increased, but so has the overall total number of apps themselves. Back in April when the first billion was hit, the store had around 35,000 apps to choose from. Currently, there are over 85,000. When you look at it this way, the number of apps is actually growing at a faster rate in relation to the number of downloads. This means, that while more downloads are taking place, developers might actually be making less money overall due to the increased competition.

Apple today announced that more than two billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. There are now more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program. “The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,”