Apple App Store Reaches 50 Billion Downloads

The 50 billionth app has been downloaded from the Apple App store, just over five years since the digital marketplace was launched.

The milestone was made by Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio in the US, who downloaded free word game Say The Same Thing into his iDevice.

Ashmore will receive a $10,000 App Store gift card for his troubles, allowing him to purchase a lot of software, music, films and TV shows.

Apple App Store downloads

“Apple would like to thank our incredible customers and developers for topping 50 billion apps downloaded,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers. We’re absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years.”

The App Store opened in July 2008 with just 500 applications, a figure which has risen to 850,000 apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with 350,000 native iPad apps. Around 800 apps are now downloaded every second and two billion are downloaded every month.

Apple reached the 40 million milestone back in January and has been leading the mobile app store wars for some time. In November 2012, research firm App Annie reported that Apple’s App Store revenues for October totalled four times the revenue brought in by Google’s Android Play Store for the same period.

Android is currently the most-used mobile operating system in the world but a new iPhone is expected to launch later this year.

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Originally published on eWeek.