Apple App Store passes 15bn download mark Apple says that it has passed the 15 billion download mark at its App Store for iOS devices. Cupertino veep Philip Schiller said the news meant that Steve Jobs' walled garden had become the "most exciting and successful software marketplace the world has ever seen", in tinned quotes accompanying the announcement. Apple says …
75 apps per device... Those iThings must have a serious lack of features as shipped from the factory!
Seriously, that is rather excessive. I have a fair few apps on my non-apple device, but even with several different sat navs, and various other feature overlaps (I'm weighing up which apps I prefer) I'm still sitting at under 30. I'm a techie FFS, 75 apps in the average, how many apps does a techie iThing owner have?!
You have apparently never used an iOS device. Apple has made it brain-dead simple to install apps. Last night a friend of mine said there was a free version of Angry Birds. I found it and installed it in less than a minute, played it for a couple minutes, then got bored and deleted it. Total time elapsed: under 5 minutes. That counts as 1 of my 75.
The fact that you have installed less than 75 apps on your device makes me wonder why apps are so hard to find and install on your device.
Not sure why you think it's hard to find... maybe it's just being choosy.
I have a non-fruit device and just (sadly) counted up the number of apps in my downloaded list. Ignoring the odd one that is in there but isn't really a downloaded app (TTS, voice search) I have 105 apps. That doesn't include the numerous ones downloaded, run and deleted in 5 minutes, of which there are many.
So,75 isn't really that many.
>> "though it should be borne in mind that many "apps" are no more than web portals to specific destinations such as news services, or similarly lightweight stuff."
Actually, it should be borne in mind that the most popular downloads are games, which are not web portals or "similarly lightweight stuff."
The 75B number refers to *downloads*, not available stuff in the App Stuff, which admittedly, contains much lightweight stuff.
-dZ.
Does it really matter that 15 billion apps have downloaded? Isn't a more important number the one where they actually sold an app? I would rather have 1% of something than 100% of nothing. If people downloaded 74 free apps and bought one, than that 15 billion is really nothing to gloat about.
When I first got an iPod Touch it was a real novelty to be able to wirelessly download new games and fun apps, but after about 2 months the fun vanished. I now have an old iPhone 3G and I have about 5 apps on it, three games ( all free ) and two photography tools The Photographer's Empheremis ( if you do photography outdoors, buy it now! ) and a DoF calculator. The rest of time I play music and watch my own videos on it.
I hardly ever bother going to the app store these days, might have a browse once or twice a month, when I'm bored but there is too much choice now, the reviews are often crap, how can you tell an app is any good with a review that reads, "ThIs si sHee-ite mAn!" or "Dis ap is da buz muv!"?!?
There must be some seriously heavy app users out there.
I think I've got about 50 on my iPad, of which at least half are more posh bookmark than app. So I've probably hit my 75 quota, as I'm bound to have downloaded half that again, and dumped them after a brief look. I'd also guess that I only use about 20 of them regularly, and the rest I barely use.
I put a £25 gift card on iTunes last July when I got the iPad, and still have £7 left. All that's gone on Apps, my music still comes on shiny silver discs.
On the other hand, we bought one for Mum for Christmas, which she loves. I don't think she's downloaded anything, except maybe iBooks.
So who's been making up the average for her? I can only guess it must be serious mobile gamers. I've been disappointed by most of the games I've tried, and few have lasted more than an hour, so I've not bothered a great deal. Electronic Arts had a sale, and I bought 5 titles for under a tenner, and they're all pretty, but mediocre to poor. Full price for the lot would be over £40, and I've barely had the gameplay to justify £4...
Either that, or there's a lot of people who just had to compare 25 different fart apps, to see which was the absolute best.
I think I've still got my Vuvuzela app that I downloaded to annoy people with during the World Cup though...
Every update of an existing application counts as a download. As does a re-installation of previously-downloaded apps onto a new device.
75 downloads per device is probably about right, with each device having around 30 apps on it.
Also, that 450,000 total figure contains some double-counting. iPad and iPhone apps are separately counted, even if they're the same application. (About 350,000 on iPhone and 100,000 on iPad, by Apple's own numbers)
Kudos to Apple, though, for showing what a (largely) piracy-free market can do for software developers. The success of iOS has nothing to do with its technology (ObjectiveC and Cocoa Touch are utter pigs, beaten only by AVKON in suckiness to write for), and everything to do with developers actually making money from their efforts.
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