“Six months after it opened for business, the store has published more than 15,000 programs for the iPhone and iPod touch and logged at least half a billion downloads — stats Apple trumpeted last Friday on its website and in full-page newspaper ads,” Phillip Elmer-Dewitt reports for Fortune.
“There seems to be something of a snowball effect,” Elmer-Dewitt reports.
“Not only has the number of applications made available for downloading grown since November, but the rate at which they’re coming has increased. The average number of apps that show up each day has more than doubled from 30 to 50 per day between August and November to 100 to 120 a day since then. Either a lot more third-party developers are writing for the platform, or Apple has sped up its approval process,” Elmer-Dewitt reports.
“Not surprisingly, given both the growth in apps and the growing number of iPhones in use, sales of applications are also accelerating. After the initial burst of 10 million downloads recorded in two days between July 11 and July 13, they hovered in the range of 1.25 million to 2.72 million a day. Then, in the 42 days between Dec. 5 and Jan. 16, they took off again, averaging 4.76 million a day — nearly back to where they were that first heady weekend in July,” Elmer-Dewitt reports.
Full article, recommended for the charts it contains, not for the misleading headline (“Apple’s App Store: Has it peaked?”) which we predict headline-only-reading ignoramuses the world over will misinterpret and state as fact, here.
