It is said that customers vote with their feet, if an election was held today, the iPhone App Store might be king of the world. In just under a year and a half, the iPhone and iPod Touch customers have downloaded more than 2,000,000,000 applications from the App Store.
The pace of acceleration seems to be in effect as well, up from a billion in April and a billion and half in July. Apple has stated that there are 85,000 applications available for the devices, an application count increase of 20,000 since July 2009.
It is a rough estimate, not confirmed, that 6.3 million apps are downloaded every 24 hours, an increase of 35% from 4.1 million downloads earlier in the year. This has been achieved in just 80 countries in over 2 years with 25 million iPhones sold, this presents a download of about 80 applications per device.
With the recent of introduction to South Korea, “iPhone in South Korea, Now in all 3 Major Asian Markets” and within months, China, “First Marco Polo now the iPhone in China”, how expansive will the iPhone app landscape be in a year from now?
The shear size and momentum of the App Store is likely to make it next to impossible to catch up, leaving the question to what other smart phone manufacturers can do to change this picture. The Palm Pre and Google’s Android will need to do something spectacular to even pinch a bit of the crust from this pie.
Some final words from the man who led this charge…
“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,” Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs stated. He continues, “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.” –Steve Jobs
Yes, Steve, it is hard to argue with you…
Originally published in the Swiss online newspaper, www.zitig.ch, reedited for WholeThinking.
