UK-based iOS magazine Tap! has sent us some fascinating statistics to demonstrate just how huge the iOS ecosystem has become. It’s quite intriguing.

Currently, we’re at around 650,000 apps on the App Store, meaning that if you started to read out each name of every app out there, it’d take a full week without stopping to reach the end. Sure, you’d be bored by then and a whole bunch of new apps would have hit the store, but it’d be an unique way of spending that week!

In a similar vein, plenty of money has been earned with Apple determining that $5.5bn has been paid out to developers since the launch of the App Store 4 years ago. To put that into a more imaginable context, that’s enough to fill 2.5 Olympic swimming pools with dollar bills! Even Scrooge McDuck would be overwhelmed by that and he’s used to swimming in money.

It equates to Apple taking in just over $1,000 every second of every day, all from the App Store. Unsurprising given there are 400m customer accounts on the store, roughly the population of South America.

Hardware wise, that means a ton of devices are out there with enough iPhones and iPads sold to stretch around the Earth, or be stacked up to 1/10 of the way from the Earth to the moon. As well as that, over half of the US could be glazed over with all the glass used to make the devices.

Interestingly for those living in the UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy, 1 in 3 people who own an iPad also own an iPhone showing that sometimes one iOS device just isn’t enough (and I include myself in that statistic!). Perhaps that’s because Disney recently determined that 75% of parents share their devices with their kids, meaning there are a lot of different hands keen to enjoy all that App goodness.

What does all this mean? Two things: the App Store is constantly growing and there’s a huge amount of options out there, and that everyone loves a fascinating statistic about something.

While you can always keep abreast of the latest developments here, Tap! is also collating their list of the best apps out there so if that appeals, go check out their vote on the magazine’s site.

The Economist, one of the more well-respected publications about world events, boasts a circulation of over 1.4 million worldwide and an almost 6 million readers of its website. Their new app, World In Figures, is based on the popular book of the same name, and allows users to access a (ahem) world of statistics on a wide variety of topics and data from more than 190 countries. The application is available globally, and covers topics from transport to commodities to tourism to movies.

The app allows users to view the data in many different ways, including per country or across different countries to compare data. In addition, it includes a trivia game built in, allowing users to test their knowledge of the topics and statistics, then share that knowledge on Facebook or Twitter for bragging rights.

The app itself was developed by XPLANE | Dachis Group, the recently merged “visual thinking company” and “Social Business Design” company. The Economist is also available as its own app, The Economist, and has released two other apps, one called, Think Space, which encourages creative and social thinking, and the other called, Which MBA?, an app focusing on comparing business degree programs.

FREE!

The Economist World in Figures iPhone edition

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2011-07-19 :: Category: Reference

Firemint Games, the developers of the 148Apps five star rated game Flight Control, have just released their sales figures for the app while it held the #1 spot in the iTunes App Store. The period covered stretches from March 24th to April 25th 2009, which is a sizable amount of time for an app to hold that position.

Here’s some of the information from the report:

Continue reading Firemint Games Provides Flight Control Sales Numbers »

When thinking of the word flurry, one could imagine a gust of floating snow, but there is nothing cold or wet about Flurry Analytics.

Flurry Analytics is a leading cross-platform mobile application analytics provider for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Java ME developers. With the intention of helping developers make better applications by providing consumer behavior and application performance analytics, Flurry announced the release of two ground-breaking extensions to its analytic services: User Path Tracking and Dynamic Parameters.

The User Path Tracking will monitor the sequence of actions completed in mobile applications by consumers and the Dynamic Parameters will analyze user-generated content and other user action data within mobile applications.

“Flurry is committed to dramatically raising the standard of iPhone and Android Analytics for its customers,” said Flurry CEO, Simon Khalaf. “Building the ability to track user flows and event parameters was technically challenging but exactly what our customers needed to better understand their consumers, increase retention and grow their active user base.”

The User Path Tracking gives developers the chance to track the sequence of actions that consumers complete in their applications from the time of launch, thus giving the option of using the collected data to increase user satisfaction and retention by improving the design of an application and discovery of key features.

In addition to the ability to track when end-users perform key actions, developers can now “describe” and understand how that action was completed in richer detail with Dynamic Parameters.

Click here to learn more about Flurry Analytics.

Today marks the one month anniversary for the App Store (officially anyway). While the full statistics are rather slim, the numbers we do know are very encouraging.

In just one month Apple has already served 60 million application downloads that resulted in $30 million in revenue. It will be great to track this over time, but given Apple’s track record we won’t hear again until they hit a major milestone.

The number one selling app has been Sega’s Super Monkey Ball (App Store) at $3 million which would equal over 300,000 copies. Though in all fairness, I Am Rich sold 8 copies at $999.99 in just 3 days for a much better return per copy.

[first seen TechCrunch and GigaOm]

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.

Facebook reported today at the Mobile Web Wars that their Facebook iPhone OS application has 1 million users.  This is totally amazing, if true.  Considering that it has never been the most popular free application in the store there must be other applications with even more users.

Hopefully Apple will release some statistics soon on sales in the App Store. The first couple days of the App Store being open stats could be gathered in the mobile App Store.  That was cut off by Apple, quickly.

via [Techcrunch]