How soon till the AppStore hits 2 billion downloads?

July 14, 2009 | Dean Takahashi | Comments |
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appstoreApple announced today that the AppStore has hit 1.5 billion downloads in the past year. There are now more than 65,000 apps available in 77 countries for the 40 million owners of iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

More than 100,000 developers are now working on apps for Apple’s devices. Apple is honoring the occasion with its usual swagger.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive, in a statement. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

Of course, we have to agree that Apple is leading the charge in the digital media revolution on portable devices and cell phones, shaking up an industry that had become accustomed to giving consumers a tiny amount of choice. Nokia, Palm, BlackBerry and others are all scrambling to catch up. But it’s very early in the revolution.

The rate of sales growth is accelerating. Apple said it hit 1 billion downloads in April and 500 million in December. At this rate, we would expect the AppStore to hit 2 billion downloads by November or December.

[Want to learn more tricks about how to build and market your app appropriately on mobile platforms, such as the iPhone? Join us at MobileBeat 2009, our mobile conference Thursday in SF. Sign up soon.]

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Photo of Dean Takahashi

About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Apple wins: my mobile media award. They will only continue to grow and get stronger. Look at the iPod -- it took off and never looked back -- now everyone has one. My prediction is that nearly everyone will want or have an iPhone by 2012.
  • sputney
    Question- how many of the 1.5 billion remain installed? I wonder if most of the apps "churn" quickly. It would be interesting to see how many remain installed or are used at least once a month.
  • @ Sputney - Flurry Analtyics, a mobile application analytics provider, is installed in thousands of applications on iPhone, Android, etc measuring real-time end-user usage. For iPhone Apps, we are seeing retention rates of around 10% - 20%, depending on how long ago an app was installed. We measure retention as the percent of all applications downloaded that have been used within the last week. So if someone downloaded in January or March, it has to be used within the last seven days to count.

    --
    Peter Farago
    VP Marketing
    www.flurry.com
    Follow us:
    http://blog.flurry.com
    http://twitter.com/FlurryMobile
  • Clearly Apple store is ruling the roost in application arena... There is no one even near to it to compete. Verizon is also toying with the idea to have its own APP store... But getting chuck of developers and building the software is not bread and butter.. Catch it if you can!!
  • ccoc
    The result is tremendous for Apple and drives sales for the iPhone and iTouch but how many of these 100,000 developers can really make a decent living ? - see comments at http://bit.ly/q9jIb
  • It would be interesting to see a breakdown of which apps make up the 1.5 billion downloads.

    Dean, do you have any sources for this type of info?
  • It is my understanding that about 95% of those apps are crap.
    That still leaves several hundred pretty cool apps though.
  • just looked at the app store, and the 1# app of the top 10 chart is called "the moron test"... you really have to be a moron to pay for that
  • will smith
    0.5 billion in december, 1 billion in april (4 months later), 1.5 billion in july (3 months later). I'd say more like late august or at latest september for 2 billion.
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