Apple's App Store hits 500,000 app milestone - revealed in a press release by Apple

Google’s Android Market may be going great guns at the moment, but Apple has just delivered a timely reminder that its own App Store is as popular as ever by revealing it has just hit the 500,000 app milestone.

It’s testament to just how fundamentally Apple has changed the face of the mobile industry that before the iPhone came along – or the iPhone 3G to be specific – app stores didn’t even exist.

But Apple changed all that by introducing the App Store in July 2008, and it set up a mobile ecosystem blueprint that the entire industry has followed. Apple has since applied the same formula to its Mac OS X desktop software, and it’s clearly been a success, as the Mac App Store has taken just a year to rack up a whopping 100 million app downloads.

“Apple revolutionised the app industry with the App Store, which now has more than 500,000 apps and where customers have downloaded more than 18 billion apps and continue to download more than 1 billion apps per month,” Apple revealed in a press release to announce the twin milestones.

“In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” Apple vice-president Phil Schiller adds.

These days the App Store is playing second fiddle to the Android Market, however, with Google’s OS marketplace having gone past the half a million apps landmark at the end of October. But Apple will argue that quality is more important than quantity, and it’s telling that while iOS users have now downloaded 18 billion apps in total, Android has only this week manage to pass the 10 billion mark.

Posted in: Apple,Apple News,apps,milestone,News,Record