AppleInsider Staff
"The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating."
The App Store serves customers in 77 countries with apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. In September, Apple announced that App Store users have downloaded over two billion apps, continuing to make it the world’s most popular applications store.
"The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve," said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. "With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers."
In September, Apple debuted the Genius recommendation feature to help users sort through the plethora of options on the App Store. iTunes 9 has also allowed users to sort and manage their iPhone and iPod touch applications more easily. This summer, the hardware maker also added keywords to software to allow for easier search.
Apple noted Wednesday that it continues to improve search and discovery with new features including App Store Essentials selections, sub category listings and more valuable customer reviews. It said developers have been pleased with the results.
"With 10,000 downloads a day, worldwide customer response to our I Am T-Pain App has exceeded our wildest expectations," said Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule. "The App Store has given us a unique opportunity to create and grow a very successful business, and we’re looking forward to an exciting future."
This summer, iPhone OS 3.0 was released, bringing over 100 new features to the iPhone and iPod touch, including Cut, Copy and Paste; MMS; landscape view for Mail, Text and Notes; stereo Bluetooth; shake to shuffle; parental controls; automatic login at Wi-Fi hot spots and Push Notifications. Apple said the new features have been popular with customers, with more than two billion Push Notifications sent to apps available from the App Store.
The company also noted that the recently introduced In App Purchase feature extended to free applications means leading developers will now be able to offer customers the choice of buying content, subscriptions and digital services from directly inside their apps.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
64 Comments
That's about 100,000 reasons you can't stop the iPhone's momentum.
What an unequivocal success story the App store is.
Could this be the future for all Software distribution? Not just Mobile SW, but computer SW?
Imagine the same system on the AppleTV platform?
Is this what the $1 billion Apple server farm in NC is for?
I know so many questions and no answers!
That's about 100,000 reasons you can't stop the iPhone's momentum.
Exactly, Quad!
I just traded up to a 3Gs from my 1st gen iPhone. Took a dozen videos clips of a walk round an Arboretum. Came home, opened iMovie for the first time, read no iMovie instructions, viewed no iMovie instructional videos and put all the clips together, synced it to AppleTV and watched it on my widescreen TV in about 20 minutes!
Man oh man, my girlfriend thinks I'm a genius!
Could never have done this on a RIM, MS, Palm, Nokia product! It's the 'Apple Ecosystem,' Baby!
PS. Went mountain climbing and a bee was bothering me...opened my 'anti-mosquito' App on the 3Gs ('squirts' out a high frequency to the bee) and it went away!
Exactly, Quad!
I just traded up to a 3Gs from my 1st gen iPhone. Took a dozen videos clips of a walk round an Arboretum. Came home, opened iMovie for the first time, read no iMovie instructions, viewed no iMovie instructional videos and put all the clips together, synced it to AppleTV and watched it on my widescreen TV in about 20 minutes!
Man oh man, my girlfriend thinks I'm a genius!
Could never have done this on a RIM, MS, Palm, Nokia product! It's the 'Apple Ecosystem,' Baby!
PS. Went mountain climbing and a bee was bothering me...opened my 'anti-mosquito' App on the 3Gs ('squirts' out a high frequency to the bee) and it went away!
Some people say that that app actually works. Scary.
What an unequivocal success story the App store is.
Could this be the future for all Software distribution? Not just Mobile SW, but computer SW?
:
I really hope not! Personally, I like to have a hard copy of my SW installs. Yes, I could burn the software to an optical disk that I download (in fact, I do that and store it away.) Secondly, what happens if you want to buy a peice of software when you are out on the road, say for an important business meeting and you have no internet connection? Or how about when (since most want to go this way) you end up having a tiered or pay-per-gig plan with your ISP?
Downsides to optical / hard copy media: it can get damaged and destroyed. Backups of important software disks are necessary. Making those backups can be difficult.
And what happens if Apple decides to release the XApp Store? Will devs have to jump through hoops to get their software approved? ("Adium was not approved for following reason: Mimics built-in functionality of OS X: iChat") Or will it be something more like Linux where we have community maintained repositories? I sure hope its not Apple Maintained... It could take a month before a computer App shows up on the XApp Store!