What are the odds the billionth App Store download was…Baby Shaker?

Nine months after opening its online App Store for iPhone and iPod touch software, Apple today trumpeted the one billionth download. The same day it apologized for having released on App Store the now-notorious Baby Shaker program. One billion isn’t bad, especially considering that App Store wasn’t planned as part of the original iPhone “consumer experience,” Apple fondly calls it. Now every device maker on the planet is trying to imitate the accidental innovation. Apples says there are 35,000 applications in the catalog. That is bad. Think about like this: if you spent 15 seconds checking each one of them, you’d do NOTHING ELSE 24/7 for next 8 months — until Christmas. It’s sort of like the iPhone equivalent of Ashton Kutcher’s one millionth Twitter follower(now over 1.3 million). After awhile you ask, what’s the point? The sheer size of the catalog is creating a range of frustrations, problems and unexpected dynamics for users and developers. A recent study found that a small number of apps do extremely well, and the vast majority disappear unremarked and practically unused into the voracious maw of the Consumer Experience. Maybe it was Karma that Baby Shaker appeared at this moment in Apple’s celebration of the consumer experience. “The application, from Sikalosoft, is a game that involved shaking the iPhone vigorously to make a crying baby on the screen stop crying. Two red X’s appear over the baby’s eyes when you ‘win.'” That makes Baby Shaker a prime candidate for our slideshow listing of “iPhone apps that could get you into trouble.” It certainly got Apple into trouble. The company issued the standard corporate “we’re sorry” statement, which, as they always are, is brief. The opening read “This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store,” according to MacWorld. Sikalsoft issued the non-standard developer “who’s sorry?” statement, on their Web site. According to the Macworld story linked to above, the original text on the Website started like this: “Okay, so maybe the Baby Shaker iPhone app was a bad idea. You should never shake a baby! Even on an Apple iPhone Baby Shaking application. No babies were harmed in the making of Baby Shaker.” Apparently, Sikalsoft must have decided that the last sentence might have sounded too much like, well, some smartass developergeeks who weren’t REALLY sorry: it’s been deleted from the current page. But they kept the helpful details describing Shaken Baby Syndrome. And the accompanying Google ads for things like “Brain Injury FAQs (Injured? Law Offices of Arnold Laub 40+ Years of Large Settlements)” and “Neurosurgery San Antonio (We Make Lives Better. Call 210-567-6027)” really don’t diminish Sikalsoft’s concern. Too much. The perfect ending to all this would be if the billionth download was for Baby Shaker, and the downloader fesses up to it and claims the celebration goodies, including that $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. UPDATE: As a reader points out below, the contest prize is not to the person who downloaded number one billion but whoever wins the contest, which is part of Apple’s billion download celebration, and which anyone has chance to win by downloading an app or registering.