Apple’s App Store hits 500,000 approved apps

APPLICATION DEVELOPERS Chomp, 148Apps and Chillingo have revealed that Apple's App Store for Ithings has hit half a million approved apps.

The infographic posted by the developers on Facebook shows the milestone of 500,000 approved applications for Apple's shiny Iphone, Ipod and Ipad devices, along with a timeline. It has been nearly three years since Jobs' Mob launched the App Store in July 2008.

But that figure doesn't actually reflect the number of apps that are available to download, which is somewhat less at around 400,000. 148Apps points out in its blog, "We've seen quite a few apps removed that were never updated to work with the latest OS, or abandoned by their developers."

It shows that the number of Apple App Store downloads has hit over 10 billion, significantly more than that of its closest rival, Google's Android market, which we've been told by Google's engineering director, Dave Burke, is at 4.5 billion.

There is no prize for guessing that games are the most popular type of app at the cappuccino company's App Store, based on the number of downloads. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the most downloaded game is Angry Birds, with 275 days at the number one spot.

The books category is on the up and is the second most popular type of app for Iphones and Ipads. The development firms predicted that the total number of Apple apps downloaded by the end of this year will reach over 15 billion, a gain of 50 per cent over the present 10 billion mark.

Apparently 37 per cent of Iphone and Ipad apps are free and the average price for a paid app is $3.64. A couple of fun facts are that you would need 7.5TB of storage to hold all of the Apple App Store apps and it would cost you $891,982.24 to buy all of them. µ