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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.
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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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
...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.
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.
That was the Unix way 20 years ago. Sadly, since the rise of the huge monolithic X-Window desktop frameworks like Gnome and KDE, it's no longer the case. Even XFCE isn't all that modular.
It would be nice if the open source world had an equivalent to 'Unix pipes' for a GUI environment - at the moment, Microsoft PowerShell is looking like the best step in that direction.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC