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Apple App Store Hits 10B App Download Mark
alphadogg writes "The Apple App Store hit the 10 billion app download mark overnight on Friday, marking a milestone involving an awful lot of Doodle Jump, Tap Tap Revenge and Angry Birds playing, not to mention Facebook and Pandora usage. The Apple App Store hit the 1 billion mark in April of 2009, after opening in July of 2008. Apple is rewarding the downloader of the 10 billionth free or paid App Store app with a $10,000 iTunes gift card in a bit of showmanship that Willy Wonka would be proud of. As of 7AM EST, however, Apple hadn't publicly identified the winner, only saying that you'd need to come back later to find out who won. Apple put an iOS app countdown ticker on its Website last week to build buzz around the milestone and generated about 250 million app downloads since. It also revealed a list of all-time most downloaded free and paid iPhone and iPad apps." The winner of the $10k is Gail Davis, a British woman whose children installed an app without her knowledge. She actually thought the phone call from Apple was a prank at first. "My daughters told me they had downloaded it and they knew there was a competition and that we may have won it," she told BBC Radio 5 Live.
Apple is like Augustus Gloop, who ended up losing because he was incredibly gluttonous and enjoyed stuffing his face beyond what one could think humanly possible.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I hope Apple covers the taxes. $10,000 is a lot to spend on Itunes since you can't buy physical Apple products. Personally I would refuse the prize because the amount of money I spend on Itunes would not exceed the amount I would have to pay for tax.
I had a similar thing happen with Apple's iTunes a few years ago. One of my kids downloaded a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff using my debit card. Since I didn't (still don't) own an iPod and run Linux on the desktop (no iTunes client) there was no way it was me. I was pretty sure it was an inside job, but there was no phone number to contact Apple. The child vehemently denied any involvement. After going back and forth a few times with iTunes' web support people, they told me it was fraud and I should involve the local police department, ending the matter where they were concerned. I went back on their site, but instead of reporting it as a fraud issue, I took the "I forgot my username and password" route. I entered my credit card info and they gave up the goods, handing over the kid's email account. The iTunes were also discovered on the kid's iPod, as well as receipts in the yahoo mail folder. Busted.
never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
I miss the Apple that made great hardware (although a little bit overpriced), and a nice OS to go with it. The iPhone/iPad/AppStore/iTunes/we-control-the-device-even-if-you-bought-it Apple that has put Macs and OS X to the background is not so nice and geeky anymore.
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So, like, when you subscribe, you're immune from being mod'ed "Offtopic"?
And like, the Apple Fanboys can't touch you and mod you "Flamebait" or "Troll"?
I may have to get a paid account with a username of 'FaggotAppleUser'.
fucking noobs
I am waiting for the Big App, and Quarter Program with Cheese.
Apple is almost the exact opposite of Augustus, in that they are still a very lean company with not a lot of employees for the revenue they produce.
The problem with the computer industry is that most of the competition is in fact heavily Augustusized - thinking only of income and very bloated/slow to boot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
has put Macs and OS X to the background is not so nice and geeky anymore.
That's not at all true. OS X and the computers they make have been updated with around the sam regularity as before. And if Apple was putting OS X in the background why would they have just launched a whole App Store dedicated to the Mac? If anything they are trying strongly to migrate some portion of the very large developer base they have amassed into doing Mac software too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just bought the Scrabble app and there are two problems, firstly it uses the American dictionary (I refuse to use the -ize ending) and secondly it allows words that aren't real words: I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure "Qualmier" isn't a cromulent word at all!
...what does one do with $10,000 to iTunes? I'd be hard-pressed to find 10,000 songs or apps that I liked. Does it work on the mac app store? Because I could see using it then for expensive productivity software.
Who is children?
While they might not have put OSX into the background they do seem to be putting the environment & UI there. They seem to be trying to shift the usage from a few apps that do a lot to dozens of small apps that each do a few specific tasks.
Which is the UNIX approach to dong things, which has worked out very well for a long time.
Great monolithic applications are the exception, not the norm. It's a lot easier to write very useful software if you target it to a specific use.
It wouldn't surprise me if they shift to a more iOS user interface and phase out the taskbar
That would surprise me a great deal since on a device where primary input is a mouse, you need something like the dock.
They can also be the gatekeeper for all your private data shared between your apps.
Only if everything went through the cloud. But Apple is a practical company, and they know networking is inherantly a secondary service, something you cannot rely on always being present. Remember they are still not letting iOS users sync over the internet, requiring a local computer - does THAT sound like someone who is going to act as any kind of "gateway" for anyone?
If you are looking for gateways of content, look no further than Android I'd say as that sounds exactly like something Google would want to do (if nothing else than to collect data about what you sync!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't 3ant to ffel TURNED OVER TO YET
The Intel switch happened long ago. The only software I can think of that's not really been re-writen that is a major loss, is Framemaker. Apple was actually amazingly good about supporting older software for as long as they could, with Rosetta and making compiling Mac applications to universal binaries fairly easy. In fact I don't know if there's a single OS maker that has EVER been able to transition architectures the way Apple did and thrive instead of die (though a large part of that of course was switching to a more mainstream processor).
Apple still supports small business just fine - I know because I get a small business discount, and the Apple people have been very helpful.
As mentioned by another poster if there's something you really, really need to run you can do so in emulation. But there's pretty much no pre-OS X software I can think of that was Mac oriented, that has not been pulled forward into the modern era of Intel OS X.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
18 downloads !!
What's 10 billion divided by 18 ??
and 10k is like what 3 mac pros? but I can build like 8 pcs with about the same cpu power with better video card and more ram and hdd space.
Creative Suite® 5 Design Premium is like 2K per system
OK, let's do some very, very rough calculations here: assume that there are six billion people on the planet and that a third of them own a computer with Internet access. That's two billion. Assume that Mac users are 10% of that group. that's 200 million. In order to account for 10 billion apps, the mean downloads/person would be 50. Really? Since the vast majority of Mac users already had the apps they needed before the store opened, I find this very hard to believe.
the app store censorship drives jailbraking and for mac os to go that way will be very bad for it.
and for locking down data shared between your apps what are you going to for users to have to upload big movies and photos to cloud? US ISP upload sucks.
Over 10B Macs Served. I would prefer an Android with fries over that.
It's pathetic how lame slashdot has gotten over the last few years.
10 billion of anything is an amazing number. 10 billion apps is amazing, especially given that the app store didn't even exist a few years ago. That means that a huge percentage of the installed base actually uses the app store. That's a lot of hits. That's a lot of usability thinking. That's a whole lot of infrastructure.
You haters who think Apple sucks - they have an infrastructure capable of billing, invoicing, tracking, and serving up 10 billion plus items; the same infrastructure is used for iTunes. 1% of their traffic would crush your website. They have enough stuff, created by developers, that they can sell 10 billion of them. That's a lot of SDK downloads. That's a lot of developers. Most importantly, that's a lot of money, both spent on infrastructure and spent by consumers.
10 billion apps is around 127 apps per second for 2.5 years, if my math is correct. And it's all what, backed by WebObjects?
Now I can start downloading apps again without fear of being involuntarily opted in to a global competition and publicly identified as the winner.
I remember geeks denials:
1. of minicomputers when mainframes where coming to end
2. of PCs when minicomputers were dying
3. of iPad when PCs started to feel rusty
4. insert your favorite denial here
I wonder, how much one needs to beat an average geek with a hard fact over the head to make him accept it?
Also, I think an (old?) geek is one of the most conservative, unimaginative and entrenched personalities in our culture (vi/gcc/gdb chain kinda proves it).
From TFA: "marking a milestone involving an awful lot of Doodle Jump, Tap Tap Revenge and Angry Birds playing, not to mention Facebook and Pandora usage
Yes, yes, progress.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
It was a bit awkward when they told her what app her son had downloaded. Apparently she did not approve of "Almost nude sexy girls on the beach."
I don't think the money has an expiration date on it. You could buy a meager 5 albums per year at $10 each, 4 seasons of television shows at $50 a piece, and rent 12 movies per year at $4 a pop, for a total of $300/year, and would run out out of money in 33 years.
the app store censorship drives jailbraking and for mac os to go that way will be very bad for it.
Actually that system works out really well for iOS. Your statement makes it sound like Jailbreaking is bad.
In iOS, you have a very secure system for the beginning user, and if they choose to learn more about the system they can open it up further.
However I don't see that happening to OS X anytime soon. Computers are the way they are and you can't really transition it to a more closed model. I think Apple has done the only thing you can do to really improve security, by offering the Mac app store they give beginning users a safer place to obtain new software than through random web links.
The funny thing about your statement though is that in fact the somewhat closed nature of the Mac app store is driving a Cydia store for the Mac also!
and for locking down data shared between your apps
Why would you? iOS doesn't lock that down, anything can for instance access the photo library. What you can't do is overwrite something there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No word on the Mac App Store's success... (snicker)
There is having a safer place for apps but censorship bans should not be part of that.
What if a I or a user wants a safe sex or fart or joke app?
We know about the 30% cut for applications, but what about music, movies and TV series?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
http://thepiratebay.org/browse/304
July of 2008 to April of 2009 is...10 months.
April of 2009 to January 2011 is...22 months
If these trends continue....aaaayy!
This is an invitation to all to check out www.merlinslibrary.com, a wiki site where you can upload all your favorite links to help each other find good sites. All you need to do is just find the appropriate topic or create a new article and upload the link. It's that easy! So check out www.merlinslibrary.com
It's been a few years since the last time I posted here. Anyways, this just goes to show how wrong was the, by now classic, quote on the original iPod launch by CmdrTaco almost 10 years ago:
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257
Best,
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
There is having a safer place for apps but censorship bans should not be part of that.
I find it a pretty grey area myself as far as there being a reason to disallow these things, but as long as web access has equal precedence then there is a way to get things that are banned...
And it's not like you can't get Fart apps aplenty.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1 thousand = k
1 million = M
1 billion = G
1 trillion = T
I was teaching my students to use the right notation for units, this week. Every time I open a newspaper, I see things where million is m, billion is mm or MM, or a somethings weight X kilos. Unit is part of the maths, too!
Thanks
Impressive but I'm sure they are probably including EVERY download, including reinstallations, updates and bug fixes.
What is it with people who don't capitalize their sentences? Do you not realize it while you're typing?
Like me, for example.
Having shelled out 500€ on a phone only to see it deliberately crippled by the vendor after less than 2 years is annoying.
I don't care about their business strategy on platform fragmentation: Apple should either put iOS 3 on maintenance mode for a reasonable amount of time or tune iOS 4 to run unimpaired on an iPhone 3G.
This behavior is unacceptable.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
OSX isn't as locked as iOS, though. The Mac App Store conveys the idea of "Hey! If you get stuff from here, it's guaranteed not to screw things up! Sure, you can get apps off the net or off a disc, but we can't guarantee safety!"
A wise man once said, "Where is my other quotation mark?