Apple has announced it has reached the 50 billion app download milestone on the App Store.
Consumers have downloaded over 50 billion apps from Apple’s App Store since it launched in 2008, reaching the huge milestone in less than five years.
The Cupertino company revealed that its customers download more than 800 apps per second, which equates to over two billion app downloads per month from the App Store.
“Apple would like to thank our incredible customers and developers for topping 50 billion apps downloaded,” said Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue. “The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers. We’re absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years.”
The 50 billionth app was downloaded by Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio. He chose to download Say the Same Thing by Space Inch, a social word game created by band OK Go. Ashmore received a $10,000 (£6,550) App Store Gift Card for being the lucky downloader that broke the 50 billion mark.
Opening in 2008, the App Store started with just 500 apps, but now offers more than 850,000 iOS apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users across 155 countries across the globe. For iPad alone, developers have created 350,000 apps across the iPad range, including the current-generation iPad mini and iPad 4 tablets.
The App Store boasts apps in categories across 23 genres and offers digital versions of newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand and books in the iBooks store as well as games, news, business, health and travel apps to name a few.
Developers have been celebrating the App Store milestone, a huge majority of which have been part of the App Store journey from the outset.
“We were blown away with our success in the App Store back in 2008,” said Rich Riley, CEO of music-tagging app Shazam. “Almost five years later we continue to be amazed with how much people love using Shazam on their iPhone or iPad. With the App Store, we can effortlessly provide users with updates that give them great new features while making it easy for new users to discover and download Shazam for themselves.”
If you’re an Android user you might want to check out what happened during the Google I/O announcements yesterday with our helpful roundup.
