News
App Store hits two billion downloads
By Charles Starrett
Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Monday, September 28, 2009
News Category: Apps + Games
Apple has announced that more than two billion applications have been downloaded from the App Store since its launch on July 11, 2008. The company also revealed that over 85,000 applications are now available from the store, with over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program and more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide.
“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”
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1
Congrats, I think…
I don’t know that I’d be bragging as much as Apple is: 85,000 apps and something in the neighborhood of 84,000 of them are nothing but pointless shovel ware that completely clog up and impede consumers finding the handful of useful applications. It takes, what?, two or three dozen good applications to accomplish 95% of tasks someone might ever want to do on a full desktop computer. You toss in a few dozen more mini-apps that perform basic tasks like play back of niche media formats or support for archive formats and you’re done… on a desktop, never mind what you’ll actually use and need with the constraints of an iPhone OS device.
For example, I checked and, including apps that are so niche I’ve never even used them, they just came associated with something else, I’ve got less than 90 applications on a full blown desktop computer that’s been in use for nearly five years at this point. There’s simply no reason for 85,000 anything for any platform if any sort of quality filter is used. And when that 85,000 different apps meets the utter mess that is the app store in iTunes (boy looking at 161 pages of little square icons in the “Music” category sure is informative), it’s unquestionably a quantity over quality “accomplishment”.
Apple’s just lucky this ultra-portable platform market is still in the “wild west” phase and they have the momentum for now. Three, four years from now nobody is going to care if there’s 85,000 or 85,000,000 apps, they’re going to care if you have support for whatever the equivalents for standards in the vein of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office are.
Posted by Code Monkey in Midstate New York on September 28, 2009 at 6:42 AM (PDT)
2
Good comment, hit the nail on the head.
But I like my 50k fart apps - seriously, there are some gems out there, I just wish the store was a little easier to navigate through the trash.
At least with foreign language stuff iPod/iPhone is the best for me.
Posted by Xing on September 28, 2009 at 7:09 AM (PDT)