Apple App Downloads Hit 25 Billion
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) released a report that says downloads from its App Store have reached 25 billion — about three times the population of the world. The figure skirts the issue of how many of these apps get used and…
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By far, the most popular Apps are games, like Angry Birds. The Facebook app is a winner, too, along with Twitter. Those are followed by “productivity” apps like Skype and Google Maps, which allow people to make their lives easier — and perhaps less expensive. Media apps also do well. A lot of people download the iBook store app. Some of these apps get so many downloads that they make their designers millions of dollars or provide huge platforms in the emerging mobile environment.
Apple does not release data on which apps are the downloaded the most often. But it is plain that, of the hundreds of thousands of apps available, most rarely get downloaded at all. Many are never seen. The size of the App Store is just too large.
Apple presents the App Store as a sort of democracy. The applications that get the most “votes” win. The balance of the apps languish, sitting in a store where they never will be commercial successes.
So, of its 25 billion downloads, probably almost all are from just a few thousand apps. The software developers of the others might as well have not made the effort to get any business at all. But, hope springs eternal.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.