Five billion downloads as Apple App Store turns two

by Stevie Smith - Jul 12 2010, 05:35

Launched back on July 10 of 2008, the Apple App Store celebrated its second birthday over the weekend as demand for the iPhone and iPod Touch continue to drive the service forward.

Having initially opened its virtual doors with a stock of around 500 downloadable applications, as of July 7, 2010, the App Store now offers somewhere in the vicinity of 225,000 third-party apps to its visitors and has racked up in excess of five billion total downloads.

In terms of quantifying the App Store’s continuing momentum, it’s perhaps worth noting that the service required a period of just nine months to hit one billion downloads, and has now surpassed five billion downloads a little over a year later.

On April 24 of 2009, Apple marked the App Store’s billionth download by running a competition that awarded one lucky customer – 13-year-old Connor Mulcahey – with an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, a MacBook Pro computer, and an iTunes gift card worth $10,000 USD.

The massive popularity attributed to the App Store is unlikely to dissipate any time soon, not least because the iPhone 4’s recent release gave Apple its most successful product launch ever as the handset sold 1.7 million units within the first three days of availability.

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