App Store Hits 500,000 iOS App Milestone

The news are flying all over the Internet that the iTunes App Store has reached the 500,000 app milestone. It has been 34 months since the App Store started accepting submissions from developers and late Monday night the last batch of iPhone, iPod and iPad apps were pushed through to bring Apple above this nice, round 6-figure number.

It is expected that Apple will make a formal announcement at their Worldwide Developers Conference in June, coming on the heels of Internet-wide celebrations and excitement.
In a report released by 148 Apps, a lot of statistics were disseminated:
Upon the iTunes App Store launch on July 10, 2008, there were 500 total apps
500,000 apps were developed by 85,569 unique developers
37% of apps are available for free
The average price for paid apps is $3.64
Games represent 15% of the available apps, books are second most popular at 14% –a balance of power that continues to shift back and forth from month to month.
You would need 7.5 TB of storage to hold all of the apps from the App Store
It would cost you $891,982.24 to purchase all of the apps from the App Store
There has been over 10 billion total app downloads
The app to spend the most time in the #1 popularity spot is Angry Birds, for 275 days
These statistics are remarkable. The investment into iOS development is considerable and market adoption is responding with enthusiasm and interest.
In comparison, Google’s Android Marketplace was released 8 months after the iTunes App Store and it now contains 294,000 apps and 3 billion total downloads.