Filed under: Apple Corporate, App Store
Apple distributes 1.5B apps in App Store's first year
Apple announced today in a short press release that it had sold distributed 1.5 billion iPhone and iPod touch applications during the App Store's first year of existence.
Despite the slow economy, App Store sales downloads appear to have accelerated since last year, showing a fairly positive polynomial trend. Apple is selling offering (via a packet-switched network) apps roughly five times faster than it did when the store opened.
The App Store now features 65,000 apps available to users in 77 countries. The iPhone Developer Program includes 100,000 members, too.
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
dan said 10:51AM on 7-14-2009
define "sold"
Reply
crsh said 12:35PM on 7-14-2009
They define "sold" as "downloaded, regardless of whether it's free or not", ie. it should say 1.5 billion -downloads-.
tripm said 11:05AM on 7-14-2009
"distributes"
Reply
mike said 11:11AM on 7-14-2009
"Apple® today announced that customers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications in just one year"
They don't give a number sold.
Reply
Mike said 11:12AM on 7-14-2009
Exactly. Apple referred to this number as downloads in the press release, not sales. But TUAW and other media will likely call these sales numbers.
Reply
tripm said 11:27AM on 7-14-2009
Actually TUAW is one of the few sources that erroneously refers to sales instead of downloads. We all know that 1.42 billion downloads were free fart apps.
Mike said 11:36AM on 7-14-2009
It would be impressive if the app store itself was a $1.5B per year market. But that isn't so.
Robert Palmer said 12:38PM on 7-14-2009
You're all right, of course. :) I've fixed the various instances of "sold" in the story, but ran out of analogues by the third time.
Love you!
Dylan said 11:27AM on 7-14-2009
I don't get it. How's app downloads any different than app sales?
Reply
mike said 11:35AM on 7-14-2009
Most apps downloaded are free.
puffin said 6:19PM on 7-14-2009
Also don't forget that app updates you've downloaded may or may not be counted in that number. So you've updated your twitter app 5 times since you got it that may count for 6 downloads alone to 1 customer.
VanillaSpice said 10:22PM on 7-16-2009
No, updates are not counted - see my comment on pg 2 for sources.
Matt J said 12:02PM on 7-14-2009
Yeah, TUAW, please fix "sold" vs. "downloaded" business - it's totally misleading at best and just plain wrong at worst.
Reply
scott Newton said 5:31PM on 7-14-2009
The 1.5 billion "Downloaded" apps includes three types of application acquistion:
1. apps which are sold the first time - these count as "sales", but Apple does not provide a separate number for this segment of the 1.5 billion
2. apps which are free, downloaded the first time
3. apps which are re-downloaded for one reason or another. Usually due to version upgrades, but sometimes due to apps which are deleted and re-downloaded, and sometimes due to replaced iPhones, and probably a few other reasons as well. This is by far the largest segment of the 1.5 billion, since most apps that I have owned have been upgraded several times since I have owned them.
Each app that is acquired (whether free or sold) originally, will be upgraded x times over it's installed life. Unless we know what the value of x is, then we cannot reliably estimate the sales value of the 1.5 billion downloaded apps.
There are other variables too. I have deleted a few apps that I have purchased because they were disappointing. There are apps that my iTunes downloaded for updates while my iPhone did as well. And there was the time I replaced my iPhone and had to re-download some apps which had not been backed up in my iTunes. These scenarios all would have to be taken into account in order to derive the sales figure from the raw download number provided by Apple.
Reply
VanillaSpice said 12:18AM on 7-15-2009
Where did you find that information - that re-downloads and updates are counted as downloads for these figures? I searched but could not find anything from Apple (or anyone else) that definitively states that it is the case that re-downloads and updates are counted.
Many people say they aren't, and many people say they are, but no-one provides a source.
I'd very much like to know whether they're counted. This will become especially important once we start comparing the App Store's success with the success of other smartphone application marketplaces, because we'll need to know that we are comparing ... well, apples to apples, I suppose.
Dave Barnes said 12:12PM on 7-14-2009
On the other hand, some people are completely delusional.
http://gigaom.com/2009/07/13/verizon-to-mobile-developers-can-you-hear-me-now/
Reply
julian said 1:50PM on 7-14-2009
haha
agreed
Travis Walls said 12:27PM on 7-14-2009
I wonder how many downloads are first-time downloads and how many are
updates/re-downloads after resetting the phone/formatting the
computer.
Reply
Alex Whiteside said 12:36PM on 7-14-2009
What the hell is the unit for time used in creating that quadratic fit line? I get it to be about 1 unit = 20 minutes, but I'm not convinced I've not deluded myself somewhere.
Anyway, extrapolating based on that line using my creative approach to mathematics gives Apple about 100,000,000,000,000 app sales (one hundred trillion) by this time next year. Not bad at all.
Reply
bkenney said 1:48PM on 7-14-2009
Fitting this to a polynomial is meaningless anyway. This is exponential growth and should be fit to an exponential.