On May 16th , Apple announced that its 50 billionth app had been downloaded from the App Store.
The 50 billionth app was a free app, Say the Same Thing, by Space Inch, LLC. Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio received a $10,000 App Store gift card for downloading the 50 billionth app. Is it even possible to spend $10,000 in the App Store? The next fifty people to download an app each received a $500 App Store gift card. When determining how many apps have been downloaded, Apple does not include re-downloads or updates.
According to Apple, customers are currently downloading more than 800 apps per second at a rate of over two billion apps per month from the App Store.
That’s pretty staggering numbers so I decided to look at the average download rate since the App Store went live on July 10th, 2008. In a mere 1,772 days, 50 billion apps were downloaded. That is a rate of:
28,216,704 apps per day
1,175,696 apps per hour
19,594 apps per minute
326 apps per second
That’s pretty mind boggling when you think about it. In under five years, the App Store has averaged over 300 apps being downloaded every second of every day since its inception. It’s even more remarkable when you consider that back in 2008, Apple started out with roughly 500 apps in the App Store. Today, there are over 850,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users with more than 350,000 native iPad apps available.
Wow.
