Apple ran a full page ad on the back-page of the business section of the Friday, December 5, 2008 New York Times. The ad is called "Solving life's dilemmas one app at a time" and it gives examples of helpful apps. But what I find most interesting is the announcement at the bottom that there are now 10,000 apps on the App Store -- recall that there were only around 500 when the store launched just five months ago -- and that iPhone users have already downloaded over 300 million apps. Wow.
The 200 millionth app was downloaded on October 22, 2008, so it only took about six weeks to "sell" (many apps are free) the last 100 million. That's about 2 million apps downloaded every day, and the momentum is gaining. Scott Kleinberg at the iPhone, Therefore, I Blog site predicts that at this rate, there will be one billion downloads by some point in 2009.
Assuming that 20 million iPhones have been sold to date (just a wild guess by me that is probably a little high; Apple sold about 13 million iPhones as of the end of September of 2008) that means that the average iPhone user has downloaded 15 apps.
As they should. There are so many well-designed, useful, inexpensive (and often free) apps available. And with so many iPhones out there, software developers have a lot of incentive to make even better apps.
Here is the ad as it ran yesterday in the New York Times. I understand that it also ran in the Wall Street Journal. Sorry that the scan is just so-so; it is impossible to scan a full page of the NYT on my scanner so I let Photoshop try to stitch together partial scans. Click to enlarge.
