Apple App Store Kicking Butt and Taking Names
While many Apple fans get a chance to see Apple’s TV ads, particularly the wildly popular “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” spots, some Apple fans get the opportunity to catch Apple doing its marketing thing in old-school newspapers. And more importantly, the most recent ads are providing information that isn’t available in the wild anywhere else.
In two print ads placed in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the ads reportedly note that iPhone users have downloaded more than 300 million apps. It’s unclear how many apps iPod touch owners, for example, have downloaded, but there’s a decent chance iPod touch apps are simply tossed into the 300 million mix. Either way, that’s a lot of freakin’ downloads.
Incidentally, the ad notes there are more 10,000 apps in the App Store, so yeah, it’s an organizational nightmare. If iTunes would only let a user open up a bunch of tabbed app windows at one time, it’d make browsing and evaluation a heckuva lot faster. But that’s a post for another day.
Doing the Math
So if the Apple App Store is up to 300,000,000 apps — I just had to type out 8 zeros to see it in number form) — Apple’s download graph is screaming toward vertical. Apple most recently announced 200 million app downloads on just 5,500 available apps — this in from Apple’s fourth quarter financial report. Apple reached the 200 million milestone on October 22, which is about a 100 days since it opened July 11, and now, the App Store delivered another 100 million apps in just 45 days.
Yeah, that’s about 2.2 million downloads each day.
Then there’s O2’s ad in the UK’s The Metro newspaper. The ad, which appears to have been posted on Flickr by an O2 employee, isn’t necessarily the work of Apple (though Apple likely has a hand in branding, even by its partners). It features dozens of app icons surrounding an iPhone 3G. The caption?
Thousands of apps, and more every day.
This changes everything.
But hey . . . Apple iPhone owners have known this since day one.
Filed Under: Apple Action
About the Author: Chris Maxcer is editor and publisher of 