Google Play Surpasses 15bn App Downloads

Google has reportedly delivered more than 15 billion apps through the newly-rebranded Google Play application store.

Formerly known as the Android Market, the store hit the milestone “a few weeks ago”, according to TechCrunch.

Strength to strength

The news means that five million apps have been downloaded since December, when the search giant announced that it had reached the 10 billion milestone and said that apps were being downloaded a rate of one billion a month. It took 22 months for the Android Market to reach the one billion threshold, but just one month to go from nine billion to 10 billion. There are apparently more than 450,000 apps and games available to download, placing it second only to iTunes.

Apple is still ahead, claiming it delivered 25 billion apps, and was delivering a billion a month back in December.

Google recently renamed its online store Google Play in March, consolidating its app, music and e-book offerings into a single outlet in an effort to combat Apple’s rival store, which supplies multimedia content to iOS devices such as iPads and iPhones. Google Drive was launched last month, offering 5GB of free storage to users, bringing it into competition with services such as Dropbox and SkyDrive.

However security concerns about the platform persist and only last week Trend Micro said that it had found a number of ‘bad’ apps which had been downloaded from Google Play more than 700 times. Malware has been a problem on Google’s mobile operating system, with instances increasing by 3,000 percent in 2011. The ease at which malicious apps was demonstrated when TechWeekEurope was able to make Android malware while in a limo.

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