The iPhone has been out for over 2 years now, and competitors are still struggling to match the success of both the iPhone and Apple's iTunes App Store. While current app stores from Palm and RIM haven't done much, if at all, to put a dent in Apple's successful online marketplace, an Apple press release issued earlier this week illustrates just how far Apple is ahead of the competition.
The iPhone has been out for over 2 years now, and competitors are still struggling to match the success of both the iPhone and Apple’s iTunes App Store. While current app stores from Palm and RIM haven’t done much, if at all, to put a dent in Apple’s successful online marketplace, an Apple press release issued earlier this week illustrates just how far Apple is ahead of the competition.
On Tuesday morning, Apple officially announced that the iTunes App Store now contains well over 65,000 apps and has already reached over 1.5 Billion downloads. If you recall, it was only a few months ago that Apple was celebrating the Billionth download from iTunes, and now it seems well on its way to 2 Billion. Even more impressive is that there are over 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program. This is significant because an app store is only as good as the developers who code for it.
Steve Jobs stated on the matter:
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”
While critics and Apple fans alike point out that it’s increasingly difficult to find quality apps in the vast sea of sometimes shoddy applications, the installed iPhone and iPod Touch user base, coupled with the sheer ferocity with which those users download applications, makes attracting developers to competing platforms like Palm and Windows Mobile an extremely hard, if not impossible, sell.
