iPhone apps: 300 million downloads in 21 weeks
Apple (AAPL) buried the news in small print at the bottom of the full-page ad that appeared Friday in the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal.
The headline said something about solving life's dilemmas one iPhone app at a time. What it didn't say was that the iTunes App Store this week passed two impressive milestones: 1) the 10,000-plus applications that are now available on the store, and 2) the more than 300 million apps that iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded.
Given that the App Store opened for business only 21 weeks ago, that works out to an average of better than 2 million downloads per day.
Only Apple knows for sure what percentage of those downloads were freebies. But we do know, thanks to 148Apps' tribute page, that the average cost of an iPhone app is $3.06, which means that the store's total revenue so far is probably less than $1 billion. (Silicon Alley Insider estimates that it's closer to $300 million, of which Apple takes a 30% cut.)
Still. No bad for a platform that's less than four months old.
See also 10,000 iPhone apps – for real this time.
Thanks to CNBC's Jim Goldman for the tip and Macworld's Jim Dalrymple for the image.
There are so many fantastic aspects of this development, but one impressive reality is that you can get games and interesting and helpful little programs without one piece of shrink-wrap, fiberboard, or plastic, downloaded and installed just as fast as can be.
This is the new model for software distribution, and pretty soon we'll be looking at software in a box like it is a relic from the Bronze Age.
Where did you get that "close to 300 million"? Sillicon Alley Insider estimate 50 to 100 million.
During the early days, the App Store average about $1 million/day in sales. That includes pend up demand. So, $50 to $100 million over 21 weeks (80+ days) sounds reasonable.
ex ped: Read the Alley Insider piece more carefully. They estimated gross revenue from paid apps to be $300 million and Apple's cut somewhere between $50 and $100 million.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InlGkFhiP9k
ex ped: Thanks! I've put a link to this video in a new post that also shows the fullscreen panorama somebody shot of the scene. See here.