Apple App Store Touches 25 Billion Downloads

Apple recently announced that the App Store has managed to cross the milestone of 25 billion downloads. In fact, they have also revealed that the 25^th billion user to download apps was Chunli Fu from China who also received a $10,000 iTunes Gift certificate. In the days leading up to the 25 billionth download, Apple had placed a countdown marker on its site.

It is estimated that around 315 million people worldwide use Apple devices like the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone. The Apple App store currently offers more than 550,000 apps for iOS based devices. The Apple iPad and iPad 2 is already the most popular tablet device worldwide and almost 170,000 apps distributed into 21 categories have been specifically built for the device (as well as the iPad 2). According to the senior Vice President of Apple’s Internet Services department, Eddy Cue, the company had never thought that the use of mobile applications would become a global phenomenon and that the Apple App store would grow into such a big marketplace for a wide variety of quality applications. He also extended his gratitude to all Apple customers for enabling the California based company to reach new heights.

The rapidly growing Google Android platform has also reported good numbers in the app development and sales department. It is predicted that around 300,000 apps are currently available for users at the Android Marketplace. The Android OS took some time to gather strength in the smartphone market which is evident from the fact that it took almost 20 months to reach the 1 billion app download mark. However, the open source platform reached the 2 billion mark in just five months and 3 billion two months later. Four months later the number of apps downloaded reached 5 billion. By the end of 2011, Android crossed the 10 billion apps downloaded mark.

Software developers should feel quite encouraged by these numbers as it shows that the demand for quality applications is increasing. It is quite heartening to see that Apple has paid nearly 4 billion dollars to app developers in revenue and these numbers show that app development is quite a profitable venture. Many experts believe that Android smartphones and tablets will continue to gather steam in the near future and it is just a matter of time before the number of applications will surpass that of Apple’s App Store.