Apple’s App Store has served 15 billion application downloads, the Cupertino, California, company announced Thursday.
According to the official numbers, the store has gone from zero to 425,000 apps in just three years. About 100,000 of those are iPad-native.
Those are impressive figures, whichever way you cut them. And, doing some math actually makes them even more interesting. Apple says there are 200 million iOS users worldwide. Dividing one number by the other gives us a figure of 75 apps per user.
Sure, many of these apps are free (and lots are just plain junk), but that’s really not the point here. Before the App Store, installing software on your phone was a horrible experience. I’m a total nerd, but even I shied away from putting much extra software on my old Symbian-based Sony Ericsson P800 and P900. And when I did, it was uniformly ugly and buggy.
Now, it is so easy and compelling to install apps that the average user has 75 of them on their device. That’s pretty incredible. In fact, shopping for apps is actually something of a pastime. I have friends who browse the App Store in idle moments and think nothing of trying out something new for a few bucks.
