iLounge

Apple has announced that the iPhone Software Development Kit, launched 95 days ago, has now been downloaded by 250,000 developers, 25,000 of which have applied to Apple’s paid developer programs. Over 35% of the Fortune 500 is now participating in Apple’s Enterprise Beta program, including the top five commercial banks, 5 securities firms, 6 of 7 top airlines, 8 of top 10 pharmaceutical companies, and 8 of the top 10 entertainment companies.

Apple also revealed further details of its App Store, through which it will distribute native applications to the iPhone and iPod touch. The Store, originally planned for 22 countries, will now be launched in 62 countries. Applications taking up 10MB or less will be available to download via cellular or Wi-Fi networks, or through iTunes. If an application is over 10MB, it will only be available via Wi-Fi or through iTunes. As Apple announced in March, developers will set the price for their own applications.

“Developer reaction to the features, power and simplicity of the iPhone SDK has been incredible,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We are seeing some truly amazing native apps from our developers and think users are going to love the breadth and depth of the applications available from the App Store.”

“The SDK allowed us to build a groundbreaking new AIM client in record time,” said Kevin Conroy, executive vice president, AOL. “The platform’s elegance and ease of use has inspired our developers to create innovative new web and SDK based experiences for iPhone and iPod touch.”

“The iPhone SDK has given us an excellent set of tools and APIs to create mobile extensions for FIM’s entire portfolio of web brands including MySpace, IGN and Photobucket in the near term, and other properties such as FOXSports.com down the road,” said John Smelzer, senior vice president of Mobile for Fox Interactive Media. “The popularity of the iPhone, along with the high demand for applications, gives us an amazing opportunity to create groundbreaking mobile experiences.”

“Cocoa-touch is a compact and robust application framework that handles all the heavy lifting for developers so they can concentrate on building their applications in record time with the legendary Apple finesse we’ve come to expect,” said David Krantz, president of YELLOWPAGES.COM.“ iPhone has been a game changer since it launched, and the availability of our YELLOWPAGES.COM application on the App Store is going to make a great device even better.”

“As mobile developers with primarily J2ME and BREW experience, we were up and running with the iPhone within two weeks,” said Jonathan Backer, manager of Mobile Engineering, The Walt Disney Company. “The hardware is stable and full-featured, while the software development tools are intuitive and represent a level of polish rarely seen in the mobile arena.”

“Since the launch of the iPhone we have seen a steady rise in traffic to the MLB.com mobile site so it made perfect sense to develop a rich client application for the App Store,” said Adam Ritter, vice president, Wireless Major League Baseball, Advanced Media. “Our development staff was excited to work on an iPhone application and reported that the SDK was robust and straight forward and contained helpful development tools. All combined we were able to expedite our development and deliver an application we know baseball fans will enjoy.”