The iTunes App Store has hit another massive milestone, selling its 25 billionth app for its iOS platform.
As with the App Store surpassing 10 billion downloads, Apple is offering a prize to the person who managed to snag Download no. 25 billion: a $10,000 gift card to iTunes. Apple hasn’t announced just who the lucky iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch owner is just yet, but expect that information to come out soon (maybe at Apple’s March 7 iPad announcement) along with lots of details about the app the person snagged. Last time around, it was Paper Glider that was the 10 billionth app, as PCWorld points out. That honor led to developer Neon Play getting the chance to turn out several more apps since then.
Mashable noted in its report that the 25 billion app download mark means that Apple has sold three apps for every single person on the planet. In fact, the average iPhone owner has about 60 apps on their devices, as a 2011 study found. This is about 50 more than the average user had downloaded in 2008. Clearly, more and more iOS users have seriously embraced the capabilities and usefulness of apps.
Smartphones in general are continuing to gain ground in the U.S. The app-using devices surpassed their “dumb” feature phone counterparts for the first time in February in America, and as Mashable reports, some 37 million of the devices were sold around the world. Back Stateside, a Pew study found that 46 percent of all adults in the country already use smartphones, up from some 37 percent in 2011.
Meanwhile, app downloads have been at record levels in the last few months. December saw more than 1 billion downloads across both Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s Android, and January had even more, both of which seemed driven by a holiday influx of device sales. The App Store, iBooks and iTunes accounted for about $5.4 billion in sales in 2011, Mashable reports, and while that’s not too big a part of the overall Apple pie (only about 6 percent of sales revenue in total), it’s an increase of a third over the previous year.
It certainly seems as though the app ecosystem is growing at a pretty fast clip and are continuing to find new customers and provide new services. Apple has hit 25 billion downloads in about three and a half years, but downloads are coming faster and faster; who knows where the numbers will be when we hit 2013.
