The App Store hit a major milestone today, in less than three years since the launch in July, 2008, Apple has seen over 500,000 applications approved in the US App Store alone. Over half a million applications!

It's amazing to see the growth of the iOS App Store. Very few devices will ever see 500,000 applications created for it. But to see this many created in less than three years is astonishing.

Before we go to far, please note that while 500,000 have been approved, the App Store is just shy of 400,000 live apps in the US. There are a lot of reasons for this. We've seen quite a few apps removed that were never updated to work with the latest OS, or abandoned by their developers. Still others removed due to violations of Apples terms. We're not sure if 20% abandoned/removed applications is high or low for a platform. My gut feeling is that it's about average.

Let's get geeky and take a look at some numbers. From that nearly three years of data we know that you'd need a 7.5 terabyte iPhone to hold all of the apps available at once on your device. I guess we have a new high end target for the storage limit of the iPhone 5. Oh, and it would cost you $891,982.24 to buy all of the apps.

37% of all live applications are free while 15% are games. It's interesting that in recent months Books has been the largest category. But just this last month we saw Games overtake Books once again.

Here's a small segment of the infographic. Click the image for the full thing in its full glory.

To celebrate this major milestone, we've teamed up with Chomp and Chillingo. Over the next few months we'll have a bunch of contests / giveaways, and look back at the life of the App Store and some of the developers that make it the fastest growing platform ever. You can keep track of all of that over at a special 500,000 Apps Facebook page we've set up and of course right here.

Posted in: News, App Store Insiders
Tagged With:
Share This: