Apple's App Store Tops 40 Billion Downloads; Generates $7 Billion For Developers 177
An anonymous reader writes "With the eyes of the tech world fixed on CES this week, Apple this morning conveniently decided to issue a press release announcing that the iTunes App Store has now topped over 40 billion downloads. That's an incredible feat, to be sure, but even more incredible is that nearly half of those downloads occurred in 2012. In December alone, iOS users downloaded over 2 billion applications, setting a monthly record in the process."
Unique downloads? (Score:4, Interesting)
or all downloads.
Re:How many developers? (Score:4, Interesting)
No idea, but do paid apps count if they're free, but with in-app purchases?
That would well skew things.
Apple's Goods and Bads (Score:2, Interesting)
-- "App Store" is a walled garden designed to keep you in
-- "App Store" is well maintained and crapware/spamware does not sneak in that often
-- "App Store" has an opaque process for allowing or denying, whether you are a singleton programmer or a 8-kiloton-Grrrilla like google. You don't get to know why you got stymied or what you need to do to fix it.
-- It provides a good "storefront" for developers to sell their wares at a decent pricepoint with low overhead (30% is low, right?) added on to it
-- It makes it impossible to be an independent software developer and sell software that can be installed by the enduser so you could set up your own infrastructure and sell direct to the customer and keep more profits
-- Their awful awful policy makes it impossible to package and distribute any GPL code through their ecosystem. Das ist verboten.
:>(
That last entry alone is enough to make the sumof(Goods+Bads)=Bad. That's my two centimes!
Re:Apple's Goods and Bads (Score:3, Interesting)
>Their awful awful policy makes it impossible to package and distribute any GPL code through their ecosystem. Das ist verboten.
Actually no. It's the GPL that makes that sort of problems (as always). Ask VLC that was released on the AppStore just to be sabotaged by one (1) pissed dev payed by Nokia. There are a number of GPL licensed apps on the AppStore. Apple has no problems with them as long as the devs agree to the AppStore terms.
Lesson to be learned : either use LGPL or better a BSD style license. (if any free software license is required). OR convince your own devs not to shoot themselves in the foot.
Re:Apple's Goods and Bads (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's just not allowed to package GPLv3 apps. All app stores have this problem, at least the ones with DRM (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, MAYBE Google Play, since DRM was introduced as part of Jelly Bean).
GPLv2 apps can be distributed just fine. GPLv2+ as well, as long as nothing makes it GPLv3+. (GPLv2 and v3/v3+ code CANNOT be combined - only v2+).
Heck, I'm not sure, but if a dev is classy enough, they could ship the source code into the IPA file too, so source code is right there with the binary.