Apple finally catches up and announces that there are 10,000 apps in the app store. You’re welcome, Apple, for the heads up earlier this week. They also announced a number that is truly staggering.

There have been 300,000,000 app downloads thus far. That’s over over 2 million per day average since the app store went live in July. That just leaves me awe struck.

Truly the iPhone is now the predominant mobile platform for application developers. Over 12 million headsets wordwide and the number 1 selling smartphone last quarter.

With the continued amazing growth we’ve seen, when do you think the app store will hit it’s 1 billionth app download? My guess is August 22, 2009 and the app will be a flashlight app . If the app store continues to grow the way it has, it should be next year.

A couple days ago, Apple turned on daily download stats for developers.  This has confirmed that sales in the app store are going strong. While few developers have disclosed any information on what their numbers are, we do know a few things.

Sega has stated that they are on track to sell 1 million copies of Super Monkey Ball (App Store) this year.

Tapulous stated that Tap Tap Revolution (App Store) has had over 900,000 downloads while their other app, Twinkle (App Store), a twitter client, has had just over 80,000.

The Facebook (App Store) native application has hit over 1 million users already.

According to 9to5mac.com, developer Erica Block is getting over 400 paid downloads a day, adding up to over $2000/day in income from a single application, 2Accross (App Store).

It’s obvious that free applications are dominating the top downloads while paid application are still getting respectable download numbers.

Check out our daily updated lists of top paid and free application in the app store.  We are also tracking what’s hot in the app store.

In less than a month, the number of items for sale in the iTunes App Store has nearly doubled from 550+ at launch to over 1000.

An interesting trend has been the number of free vs. paid apps.  At launch, free apps dominated the store, now with over 1,000 apps less than 30% of applications are free.