Less than three years after Apple's iTunes began releasing applications for its iPhone, iPod Touch and later iPad devices, the iTunes store has now offered up over 500,000 iOS apps for download (both free and paid) for the US market. The milestone, according to CNN Money's web site, was achieved after midnight on Tuesday when Apple released a number of new apps for download. The iTunes App Store first launched on July 10, 2008 with just 500 apps. The actual number of iOS apps currently available to download is about 400,000, according to the article, due to replacing older apps and the withdrawal of others. The article states that as of January 2011, over 10 billion iOS apps have been downloaded from the app store.
Releasing 500,000 of anything is something to celebrate, at least according to three companies. iOS game developer Chillingo has teamed up with the search company Chomp and the mobile app blog site 148apps to release a massive chart of info that includes a timeline and tons of facts about the iTunes App Store's history. Among the facts on the chart is that games make up the most iOS apps at 15 percent, followed by books at 14 percent and general entertainment apps at 11 percent.
More facts from the chart: 37 percent of all iOS apps are free to download. If you actually buy an app, the average price is $3.64. There are also over 85,000 unique developers that have apps on sale on the App Store.
Comments (16)
ReplyTrying to steal Mango's thunder are we apple?
Wow. Granted alot of them are junk (I guess thats subjective) but thats still pretty crazy.
Yeah thats a very nice number, but theres still big group of apps that are not avaible in other than US app store
Wow. 500,000 apps that the OS should be capable of handling. iOS must be more limited than I remember.
Huh?? Your comment doesn't seem to make much sense. How is 500,000 apps on a mobile platform "limited"?
THE OS is limited in the sense that an app is necessary to do any such task. How is that confusing?
That's what an OS is for, like Windows, Linux, MAC OS, Android, etc.
An operating system (OS) is software, consisting of programs and data, that runs on computers, manages computer hardware resources, and provides common services for execution of various application software.
For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between application programs and the computer hardware,[1][2] although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and will frequently call the OS or be interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on almost any device that contains a computer.
Source: Wikipedia
That's what an OS is for, like Windows, Linux, MAC OS, Android, etc.
An operating system (OS) is software, consisting of programs and data, that runs on computers, manages computer hardware resources, and provides common services for execution of various application software.
For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between application programs and the computer hardware,[1][2] although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and will frequently call the OS or be interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on almost any device that contains a computer.
Source: Wikipedia
A third party app that needs to run and be put into memory or a save-state to switch in and out of. Sorry - I think it makes a lot more sense to have the OS, especially on a portable device, with a small screen to handle more of that for you. To each their own.
Those are applications on a full-fledged computer. On a smaller device you would expect some features to be built into the OS. You too must be new to the mobile sector and are used to the way Apple has been handling this all along. You're obviously missing what I am suggesting here.
Those are applications on a full-fledged computer. On a smaller device you would expect some features to be built into the OS. You too must be new to the mobile sector and are used to the way Apple has been handling this all along. You're obviously missing what I am suggesting here.
Does it really matter? whether its a part of the OS or its downloaded from 3rd party sources, it still functions the same way as it should
Yay that means they have 500 versions of each app including 25,000 versions of twitter. 85,000 unique developers and probably only around 20,000 which actually put in effort.
So true... lol
I agree, there is probably less then 500 good apps in total.
They really need to clean up the store.
-"trial/lite" apps should not count as unique apps
-Apps that use a separate app for each language should not count as multiple apps
Better filtering from the official app store app is also needed, with the ability to filter out trial-lite apps and apps that are useless without spending a ton on in game purchases.