Apple
Apple’s 1.5 billion apps and why you should care
By Jim DalrympleJuly 14, 2009, 2:54 pm PT
Apple kicked off Tuesday morning by releasing some of the latest download numbers from the App Store. You may be thinking that’s just another press release slinging a bunch of numbers around, but you should really stop and take a look at these.
Let’s get the reported numbers out of the way first. Apple says it has more than 1.5 billion downloads with more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 registered developers in the iPhone Developer Program.
And that is all within the first year the store has been open.
Consider this. Apple sold its 1 billionth app on April 23, 2009 and at that time it had 35,000 apps in the store. That took nine months.
In the next two and a half months it sold 500 million apps and almost doubled the amount of apps available for download to 65,000. That is an incredible amount of growth in a short period of time.
So even if Apple continues on as it is right now, it will be on course to sell 1 billion apps every five months. And that’s without factoring in the incredible growth it is continuing to see.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs summed up the company’s success in two quick sentences. “The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Jobs. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”
It will definitely be very hard for others to catch. During his WWDC keynote address, Apple’s Phil Schiller listed the amount of apps available for each of its main competitors. Android had 4,900; Nokia was at 1,088; Palm had 18; and the BlackBerry just passed 2,000 last week. The App Store had 50,000 at that time.
What this means in the broader scope of things is that Apple took on an entrenched cell phone industry and completely changed it with its hardware and software. It also revolutionized the way apps are bought and sold.
In fact, Apple has done it so well that its competition is trying to copy everything it does. Sadly, for RIM, Nokia, Android and Palm, copying another company’s successes is no way to build a business.
Apple is on the leading edge with the iPhone and App Store, and they have proven they can maintain the momentum. Now the question is, what will the competition do?
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Apple’s 1.5 billion apps and why you should care
By Jim DalrympleJuly 14, 2009, 2:54 pm PT
Apple kicked off Tuesday morning by releasing some of the latest download numbers from the App Store. You may be thinking that’s just another press release slinging a bunch of numbers around, but you should really stop and take a look at these.
Let’s get the reported numbers out of the way first. Apple says it has more than 1.5 billion downloads with more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 registered developers in the iPhone Developer Program.
And that is all within the first year the store has been open.
Consider this. Apple sold its 1 billionth app on April 23, 2009 and at that time it had 35,000 apps in the store. That took nine months.
In the next two and a half months it sold 500 million apps and almost doubled the amount of apps available for download to 65,000. That is an incredible amount of growth in a short period of time.
So even if Apple continues on as it is right now, it will be on course to sell 1 billion apps every five months. And that’s without factoring in the incredible growth it is continuing to see.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs summed up the company’s success in two quick sentences. “The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Jobs. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”
It will definitely be very hard for others to catch. During his WWDC keynote address, Apple’s Phil Schiller listed the amount of apps available for each of its main competitors. Android had 4,900; Nokia was at 1,088; Palm had 18; and the BlackBerry just passed 2,000 last week. The App Store had 50,000 at that time.
What this means in the broader scope of things is that Apple took on an entrenched cell phone industry and completely changed it with its hardware and software. It also revolutionized the way apps are bought and sold.
In fact, Apple has done it so well that its competition is trying to copy everything it does. Sadly, for RIM, Nokia, Android and Palm, copying another company’s successes is no way to build a business.
Apple is on the leading edge with the iPhone and App Store, and they have proven they can maintain the momentum. Now the question is, what will the competition do?
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I’ve seen it countless times over the last two and a half decades: Apple customers are for the most part a significant cut above the average humanoid.
There are indeed various strata of awareness levels in the society. The legion office drone lemmings make up one rather profound stratum of mediocrity, many of them barely able to operate any sort of computer, depending for the most part on ineptly memorizing a half dozen routines for handling their computer traffic. These couldn’t care less about Apple’s “aesthetics” or “quality.”
These same people also use cell phones and smart phones, the main criterion of choice being price or “free.”
I’ve had to deal with a dozen or so of these tinker toy predecessors to the iPhone over the past decade and a half, struggling with primitive phone OS’s and stupid and awkward user interfaces. The saving grace of these gadgets was of course their portability.
Then, enter the iPhone. Not just another cell phone. Not just another smart phone. It just wasn’t fair, was it.
How dare anyone upset that huge complacent apple cart of a phone industry!!
Talk about not fair, though. It wasn’t just a “blow” to the vested interests. It was a veritable “kill shot” like Bruce Willis, “The Last Boy Scout”, delivered to that bad guy who messed with him by the pool, shoving the guy’s nose into his brain.
How could anyone answer Apple’s formidable iPhone coup? If there’s any answer at all, it’s not likely to appear for years to come, and then only after Apple somehow goes psycho and self-destructs. But from all signs visible today, that’s highly unlikely, too.
In the mean time, the Apple stratum is rejoicing and relishing in Apple’s success and in the daily pleasures of iPhone ownership and usage.
Apple has the huge advantage of rabid fans. Rabid fans, rabid developers.
The competitors are being run over by a giant snowball that keeps getting larger.
There really is nothing they can do.
Apple is competing with an ecosystem – hardware, operating system, software, 3rd party applications, 3rd party accessories, desktop software, iTunes music-movie-app store, Me.com services, Macintosh laptops and desktops, 3rd party hardware, rabid fans, coolness, design, games, video capabilities, location services, iPods, iPod Touch (which doubles the market size).
No one has as complete an ecosystem as Apple.
Just the iPhone plus iPod Touch is a double whammy that others cannot compete against.
Everyone else is selling an incomplete solution or lifestyle. Why choose this, when you can have everything with Apple?
For years, companies have competed with the iPod, but have failed to knock it down.
The iPhone will have similar success.
There is no company that has an ecosystem that Apple has. Therefore, they automatically lose.
Now that the iPhone 3G is only $99, other companies are getting squeezed at the low end as well. Thus even they can’t compete on price.
Apple has taken away any weapon that can be used against it by other companies.
Apple has simply been the BEST competitive company seen in the world.
Apple loves competition, by the way. There is space for everyone. Apple does not seek to destroy competition like Microsoft has tried to. Apple invites competition.
Apple’s lifeblood is just to build the best product it can. This is difficult for other companies who don’t have this passion to do. And no company currently exists in the Cell Phone market that has the skills and talent to make a better product than Apple.
Like my mom used to say, “Overnight success takes ten years of hard work.”
The only problem with the 65,000 apps is that only about 50 of them are worth having – the rest are useless lighter, fart app-type things that are amusing for 3 seconds then get deleted
The number of useful apps out of 65K has to be far larger than your silly estimate in order to result in 1.5 billion downloads in one year.
Gee, ya think?
I was going to get an I Phone last year when I replaced my Palm. However the I Phone did not have an application for “Memos” which I had to have. Consequently I got a Palm Centro which I am about to replace again.
Why will Apple not do a useful application like “Memos” & “Tasks” so you can separate things instead of having to do everything in “Notes”.
[...] almost 65,000 apps available, and 1.5 billion downloaded in its first year, Apple’s App Store is being touted as one of the main reasons for the success of the iPhone [...]
[...] milestone for its App Store — 2 billion downloads. It was 76 days ago, on July 14, that Apple announced it had 1.5 billion downloads and 65,000 apps available for download. Since then, it sold over 6.5 million apps a day to reach [...]