App Store Passes 25 Billion Downloads Milestone

[Maura]

AppleInsider reports today that Apple’s App Store has finally surpassed the milestone of 25 billion downloads. Apple announced the achievement by the following huge, hard-to-miss message on www.apple.com:

“A billion thanks. 25 times over. The App Store has reached 25 billion downloads. Thanks for getting us there.”

There’s no word as yet who the lucky person is who has won the App Store gift card, let’s just hope it’s one of us!

Apple started the countdown to 25 billion downloads on February 17, when the number had reached approximately 24.29 billion, so it has taken a little over two weeks to cross the final hurdle. This makes it just over one year since Apple announced that it had achieved the last big milestone of 10 billion downloads, which it attained on January 22, 2011.

Apple has paid more than $4 billion to app developers and has over 600, 000 apps in the App Store, according to AppleInsider.

Source: Apple's App Store reaches 25 billion download milestone

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Every time Apple holds a keynote or earning call they love to brag about how many apps are available in the App Store. Right now Apple’s boasting that there are 500,000 apps for the iPhone, which you know, sounds really freaking amazing when you’re thinking about buying and iPhone. Think of all the cool stuff you could with 500,000 different apps.

Yes, the App Store is awesome and it’s packed with some truly solid apps, but the truth is that most of the 500,000 apps that Apple brags about don’t ever get noticed. In fact, a recent analysis revealed that two-thirds of all apps in the App Store are “zombies,” meaning they never get downloaded, are invisible to users, and have no ranking.

Adeven, a German startup that specializes in mobile analytics and ad verification, just launched their new AppTrace tool today that can trace how often an app is downloaded, review scores, and overall ranking. Before the official launch of AppTrace, Adeven analyized around 400,000 apps on the App Store to get a big on how healthy Apple’s walled garden is, and the results were fairly abysmal.

“The reality is there are only a couple of thousand apps that really make some kind of downloads,” said Christian Henschel, Adeven CEO. “This is based on Apple’s closed system — it’s tough to discover those kinds of apps. You don’t have proper search, so the only way to discover new apps is through the top listing.”

“If you’re not on those lists, it’s not sure that you’re being discovered by anyone else. The top 25 tend to be the same companies who spend millions of dollars to get to the top of those lists. If you’re an independent, small app publisher, then it’s really tough to be discovered.”

The search functionality in the App Store has always left a lot to be desired, leaving developers on their own to market their apps to gain attention. iOS 6 aims to improve some of the problems with search, and many believe Apple will utilize their recent acquisition of Chomp to do so.

Even if Apple improves search though the biggest problem for developers is to distinguish themselves from their competition. After all, when the App Store already boasts 1,899 flashlight apps, how different can you really be?

It's actually pretty cool, but still in beta.

7-31-12

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