Apple's App Store Downloads Top 1.5 Billion in First Year
More Than 65,000 Apps; Over 100,000 Developers — Apple® today announced that customers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications in just one year from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple had previously offered only a limited look at the App Store's all-time leaders, making the store's aggregate scale and the breadth of its developer base harder to assess. The one-year figures establish that Apple has assembled both a large catalog and a sizable developer channel around a single distribution point.
Coverage of the announcement by TechCrunch and the L.A. Times Tech Blog indicates that the milestone travelled beyond Apple's own release, while the related stories focused on how iPhone software was being used rather than treating the store as a stand-alone catalog.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a larger software-distribution channel, with more than 65,000 apps available to customers and more than 100,000 developers participating.
- Developers gain access to an audience that has generated more than 1.5 billion downloads, while facing a catalog large enough that discovery becomes a more consequential part of reaching customers.
Second-order effects
- Apple's curation and ranking choices carry greater weight as the catalog expands, since earlier coverage of leading apps highlighted how visibility can separate titles within the store.
- Mobile software makers and developers have a stronger incentive to prioritize the App Store as a route to customers, concentrating demand and developer attention on Apple's channel.
Third-order effects
- If developer participation and download activity continue to reinforce one another, mobile software distribution may organize around centrally governed app marketplaces rather than direct developer-to-customer channels.
- The App Store's scale points toward competition among mobile platforms being shaped not only by devices, but by the size and discoverability of each platform's software ecosystem.
The trend: Mobile platforms are becoming two-sided software marketplaces in which customer demand attracts developers and a growing catalog, in turn, makes the platform more valuable to customers.