Over the weekend, Apple quietly placed an App Store ad in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which happened to casually mention that the App Store now has over 10,000 apps available and that there have been more than 300,000,000 downloads. Yes, that is eight zeroes after that three. Yes, that is pretty much an app for every man, woman and child in America. No, that number does not actually mean anything.
It’s worth noting that Apple put this number in an advertisement and not in a press release. The probably has something to do with the fact that there’s no real significance to the number of downloads from the app store. Let’s quickly go over what this number doesn’t mean.
This number does not indicate the following:
- The amount of revenue generated by the App Store
- The number of currently installed apps
- The number of unique apps downloaded
- How many of the 300 million are updates to existing apps
- The ratio of free apps to paid apps
You get the idea. So what does the number indicate? Essentially, that their servers have been accessed for app downloads 300 million times, including apps that were deleted after five minutes for being worthless or have been updated 10 times, thus multiplying that app’s download number by 10. And for the shareholders? Nothing. 299,000,000 could be free apps, for all we know. There’s no word of how profitable the app store has turned out to be, though I imagine those numbers would be quite impressive. Just not 300,000,000 impressive.
On the other hand, this is pretty newsworthy when looked at in an historical perspective. On Oct. 21st Q4 earnings call, Apple announced that it had sold 200,000,000 apps. That means that another hundred million have been downloaded in about six weeks. That’s about 2.3 million per day!
It is impressive to have people downloading that many apps. It’s just also worth noting that that’s all it is; an impressive number in an advertisement, trying to get prospective buyers to see how many people are using a bunch of apps to do useful and interesting things. We’ll see what this all means at the next earnings call. Until then, I suppose we can ask our iPhone-hating friends how the Blackberry or Windows Mobile app stores are doing. Oh, wait…
Edited to correct my idiotically misplaced decimal.
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December 8th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
It shows one simple thing………… Demand.
I’ve read many articles pertaining to home based developers making a bundle on the App Store. If they are making money Apple sees 30% of that.
I also love the fact that the iPhone BLEW past Windoze Mobile for market share. Balmer just ate his ignorant words for breakfast and I’m loving it. What does Microsoft have coming that is in the least bit exciting? Nothing, nada, zilch.
Nice article by the way.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Sean,
I think you’re right about the demand aspect (and, of course, Ballmer’s Thanksgving-sized feast on his own words). The most important thing that this 300 million downloads number represents is the level to which the app store is established. Android may be planning its own App Store, but it will have to contend with something the iPhone’s did not: A well established behemoth of a competitor. Imagine how big things would be now if Apple had anticipated the demand for such a thing at the iPhone’s initial launch.
December 8th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Good point regarding Android Shawn.
By the way, you spell your name wrong.
)
December 8th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
The 80s called and want their hat back.
It makes no sense to count “updates”. Anyone who can’t figure that out is not using both of their brain cells.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Check your math on the sales per day. 6 weeks 42 days 100M gives 2.2M per day not 250K.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
@ KenC: It’s hard to say for sure how they derive their numbers, but it’s likely that the statistics their servers generate can’t differentiate from a person who decides to try an app for the first time when it’s reached version 1.6 and someone who’s downloaded 1.6 as an upgrade to 1.5. It would almost certainly be a whole lot of extra work to cross-reference download statistics with iTunes purchase histories, especially as this is a statement from an ad, which is going to use the loosest possible accounting it can to sound impressive. If this were an earnings call or even a press release, we would likely see a more refined number that took all these factors into account. Oh, and it’s actually a vintage fedora from the ’40s
@Pat: Thanks for catching my error. I’ve updated the post with the accurate figure.