Do you know when Apple’s iTunes app store launched? July of 2008. I have socks in my sock drawer that are older than the app store. Well, it turned out a lot more successful than anyone expected, certainly more so than my socks. It has just surpassed 25 billion downloads.
The iTunes App Store opened in July 2008, a year after the release of the iPhone, and within a year 50,000 apps were available and the store had seen more than one billion downloads.
Apple announced 10 billion app downloads in January last year, meaning that a further 15 billion have been downloaded in a little over a year. There are now more than half a million apps available in the app store.
The 25 billion isn’t all that meaningful a number I suppose, though it is a high one, but that rate of growth is what’s astonishing.