News

Apple Reports 60 Million App Store Downloads

Marin Perez

CEO Steve Jobs said Apple's application store has seen about $30 million in sales in a month.

Apple users have downloaded more than 60 million programs from the App Store since its launch a month ago, according to CEO Steve Jobs.

While most of the programs are free, Jobs told The Wall Street Journal that Apple sold an average of $1 million worth of applications a day. If these figures hold up, it could lead to $360 million a year in new revenue.


More Personal Tech Insights

Webcasts

More >>

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

"This thing's going to crest a half a billion soon," Jobs said. "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."

Apple won't get all that money, as application developers keep 70% of sales. Jobs said developers earned about $21 million in the first month. While Apple gets 30% of all sales, the company's CEO said the real value is increasing the appeal of devices like the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch.

"Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that," said Jobs. "We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software."

Video games have been one of the most popular application categories, as the iPhone offers game developers an attractive mobile platform because of its robust processor, motion controls, a touch screen, and strong graphics capabilities. Sega said it has sold more than 300,000 copies of its Super Monkey Ball game at $9.99 a piece.

Enterprise apps from companies like Oracle haven't been as popular, but that may change as more iPhone handsets enter corporate markets. Research firm Gartner recently said the iPhone meets the minimum requirements for use on corporate networks, although there are some caveats.

The success of the App Store may be bad news for companies like Microsoft, Nokia, and Google, as they battle to attract quality application developers for their respective mobile platforms.

Related Reading


Informationweek Discussions

Start the Discussion


InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links