When he returned to work last month, Steve Jobs said simply that “the iPhone is winning” after Apple’s new 3GS model sold more than one million units in its first weekend.
Today, just over a year since the App Store went live, Apple is out with a new milestone number: 1.5 billion applications downloaded. According to the company, there are now more than 65,000 applications available and 100,000 developers. Additionally, they are now serving a market of more than 40 million devices (iPhones and the iPod Touch).
In a statement, Steve Jobs said that “The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.” That certainly seems to be the case at the moment, with competitors like Nokia, Palm, and BlackBerry only starting to get their own app platforms up and running.
As for the app store’s growth rate, Apple announced 1 billion downloads in April, and 500 million back in December. In other words, it would seem that growth remains steady, if not slightly accelerated, buoyed in recent weeks by the launch of another new app store-ready device.
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