Fifty billion. That’s how many apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App stores, according to the iconic technology company.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior Vice-President of Internet Software and Services, announced the milestone in a press release yesterday in which he said that an Ohio man who downloaded the 50 billionth app had won a $ 10,000 gift card for the App Store.
“The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over $ 9 billion to developers,” Cue said.
Customers download over 800 apps per second from the App Store at a rate of two billion apps per month.
The App Store opened in July 2008 with 500 apps and now offers over 850,000 apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
The milestone keeps Apple just ahead of rival Google, which announced on Wednesday that it had reached 48 billion app downloads for its Android operating system. Google is likely to take the lead soon as Android controls 74 per cent of the world’s smartphone market compared with 18 per cent for Apple.