Apple iOS App Store Reaches 15B Downloads

Apple announced today that over 15 billion apps, including many games, have been downloaded across 200 million iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users in 90 countries. The numbers represent over 425,000 distinct apps, including 100,000 native to the iPad tablet. Apple has paid over $2.5 billion to developers to date, the company said. For context, Apple announced in June that it had sold 15 billion songs thorugh its iTunes Store since the service launched in 2003. Today's announcement comes less than six months after Apple reached the 10 billion iOS app download milestone, and just over a month after the company announced 14 billion iOS app downloads at a Wordwide Developers Conference presentation. It took over a year for the App Store to attract its first 2 billion downloads after a July 2008 launch on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but only three months more to reach 3 billion downloads by early 2010. Games were the most popular app category in 2010, representing 16.6 percent of all app purchases and dominating a list of the most popular iOS apps of all time which Apple published in January. Apple expanded its App Store to the Macintosh computer in January, attracting over a million downloads in its first day of service.