Apple App Store Hits 10B App Download Mark 195
alphadogg writes "The Apple App Store hit the 10 billion app download mark overnight on Friday, marking a milestone involving an awful lot of Doodle Jump, Tap Tap Revenge and Angry Birds playing, not to mention Facebook and Pandora usage. The Apple App Store hit the 1 billion mark in April of 2009, after opening in July of 2008. Apple is rewarding the downloader of the 10 billionth free or paid App Store app with a $10,000 iTunes gift card in a bit of showmanship that Willy Wonka would be proud of. As of 7AM EST, however, Apple hadn't publicly identified the winner, only saying that you'd need to come back later to find out who won. Apple put an iOS app countdown ticker on its Website last week to build buzz around the milestone and generated about 250 million app downloads since. It also revealed a list of all-time most downloaded free and paid iPhone and iPad apps." The winner of the $10k is Gail Davis, a British woman whose children installed an app without her knowledge. She actually thought the phone call from Apple was a prank at first. "My daughters told me they had downloaded it and they knew there was a competition and that we may have won it," she told BBC Radio 5 Live.
Great, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
In what way obese? (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple is almost the exact opposite of Augustus, in that they are still a very lean company with not a lot of employees for the revenue they produce.
The problem with the computer industry is that most of the competition is in fact heavily Augustusized - thinking only of income and very bloated/slow to boot.
UNIX (Score:4, Insightful)
While they might not have put OSX into the background they do seem to be putting the environment & UI there. They seem to be trying to shift the usage from a few apps that do a lot to dozens of small apps that each do a few specific tasks.
Which is the UNIX approach to dong things, which has worked out very well for a long time.
Great monolithic applications are the exception, not the norm. It's a lot easier to write very useful software if you target it to a specific use.
It wouldn't surprise me if they shift to a more iOS user interface and phase out the taskbar
That would surprise me a great deal since on a device where primary input is a mouse, you need something like the dock.
They can also be the gatekeeper for all your private data shared between your apps.
Only if everything went through the cloud. But Apple is a practical company, and they know networking is inherantly a secondary service, something you cannot rely on always being present. Remember they are still not letting iOS users sync over the internet, requiring a local computer - does THAT sound like someone who is going to act as any kind of "gateway" for anyone?
If you are looking for gateways of content, look no further than Android I'd say as that sounds exactly like something Google would want to do (if nothing else than to collect data about what you sync!).
Slashdot is now officially pathetic (Score:2, Insightful)
It's pathetic how lame slashdot has gotten over the last few years.
10 billion of anything is an amazing number. 10 billion apps is amazing, especially given that the app store didn't even exist a few years ago. That means that a huge percentage of the installed base actually uses the app store. That's a lot of hits. That's a lot of usability thinking. That's a whole lot of infrastructure.
You haters who think Apple sucks - they have an infrastructure capable of billing, invoicing, tracking, and serving up 10 billion plus items; the same infrastructure is used for iTunes. 1% of their traffic would crush your website. They have enough stuff, created by developers, that they can sell 10 billion of them. That's a lot of SDK downloads. That's a lot of developers. Most importantly, that's a lot of money, both spent on infrastructure and spent by consumers.
10 billion apps is around 127 apps per second for 2.5 years, if my math is correct. And it's all what, backed by WebObjects?
Re:UNIX (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is the UNIX approach to dong things, which has worked out very well for a long time.
Great monolithic applications are the exception, not the norm.
That was the Unix way 20 years ago. Sadly, since the rise of the huge monolithic X-Window desktop frameworks like Gnome and KDE, it's no longer the case. Even XFCE isn't all that modular.
It would be nice if the open source world had an equivalent to 'Unix pipes' for a GUI environment - at the moment, Microsoft PowerShell is looking like the best step in that direction.
Re:This doesn't compute (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah a lot of people take the 'download all the free apps you can find, try them and delete the bad ones' approach. Easy to get to 10B that way. If they were all paid apps (even cheapo ones at $1.99 or whatever) they probably wouldn't have even got to 1B yet.
Re:This doesn't compute (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny how I didn't hear any such objections when it was "Mozilla passes X million downloads". In fact, it was all hyped up how much one download could be a thousand corporate PCs. So it's not comparable to say iTunes sales, but it shows that free apps is a big reason people get an iPhone. Plus it's rather disingenuous attempt to imply that free downloads are worthless. Downloads of the Facebook app is very valuable to both Apple and Facebook, even if they aren't charging you for it. Sure there's trivial apps but it's like Firefox's endless extensions, some of them are pretty damn worthless but you don't hear people complain about that, at least not on slashdot.
It's not exactly news that Apple-bashing has been popular here since the first iPod. Not to mention the vastly exaggerated claims of open source being the source of Apple's success. So they took a BSD kernel and adopted certain unixisms, but in terms of what sells Apple it's like bragging over delivering the plumbing to an award winning building design. Apple has done great and they've done it almost all on their own and none of the spotlight has even reflected on open source. I would bet that 99.99% of Apple's customers doesn't even know and wouldn't have known the difference if it had been some proprietary kernel.
Is everything perfect in Apple's walled garden? Of course not, but so far my experience with my iPhone has been great minus the people who wrote the alarm clock. Neither is it perfect in the One Microsoft Way, but it's hardly that in the Linux bazaar either. I'm sick and tired of these three phrases:
1. If you want it fixed, write a patch for it. That's the beauty of open source.
2. Well, you got what you paid for. You've got nothing to complain about.
3. If you dislike it so much, why don't you go back to Windows (Winblows, Micro$oft)?
It's the unholy trinity of "We don't have a problem, you do. Now fuck off." even if you complain about something that's obviously broken for a common use case and makes using it hopeless. And through anti-proprietary fanaticism there's usually not a single commercial alternative even if the money is burning in my pocket. I've pretty much decided to abandon Linux after 3.5 years as my primary desktop and go either Mac or Windows, I just haven't decided which yet. Because I want my choice back, if whatever open source delivers doesn't work I'll go buy something that (probably) does.