App Store: 1.5 Billion Apps Served
While there are many discussed problems with the app store from a developer prospective, it has really taken off with consumers. The word revolutionary seems to be thrown around a lot in relation to the iTunes App Store. But the app store really has done things for consumer app shopping that we've never seen before. Even others that have tried to reproduce the functionality of the app store since it was launched just over a year ago, such as Google and Blackberry, have failed to even come close. Steve Jobs commented on this fact in the announcement:
"The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."
With 58,088 active apps in the US app store today, and 300 new ones added every day, will the growth ever slow?
We recently asked our readers to weigh in on how many apps and how much they have spent in a survey. The average number of applications and games downloaded thus far by the 160 respondents was 230. This is a larger number than I would have expected for a fairly new platform. Respondents also noted that they have spent, on average, $136 thus far on applications and games with the average monthly spend being in the $11-$20 range. That puts the average price paid per application at just $0.59 indicating that more than half of the applications downloaded by the people responding to the survey were free.
It took 9 months for the first billion apps to be downloaded and just 3 for an additional half billion to be added to that. So as we continue to up this steep growth hill, there's still not peak in sight. I'm sure developers hope that Apple will get some of the issues they face with developing and selling apps fixed, but for consumers, it's been a pretty smooth ride.