It would seem people really enjoy downloading apps to their iPhone and iPod Touch units.
- 85,000 apps
- 125,000 app developers
- 6.6 million apps downloaded a day
That’s what the statistics look like for the Apple App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It was just a little over 2 months ago that the App Store passed the 1.5 billion download mark, and here we are at 2 billion. And before that, it was only this past April that they surged past the 1 billion downloads mark.
“The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it.”
I think the big question at this point is what is the user engagement and retention on these apps? Just because they get downloaded doesn’t mean they are being used on a regular basis. This has been the source of many studies at this point, and almost all of them find that after the initial download, the users tend to dwindle off the usage of them pretty rapidly. Of course this doesn’t matter on Apple’s end, but it is still interesting to think about, especially on the paid apps. Apple did not specify the number of free-to-paid apps downloaded, which I think would actually be a far more interesting number to look at, but something I doubt they will ever announce.
Either way, congratulations Apple!
