Apple App Store: 40B Downloads And Counting; 2B+ In December, ~20B In 2012

 In a piece of classic Apple timing, Cupertino has just issued a press release to draw some eyeballs away from CES. It has announced that more than 40 billion apps have now been downloaded from its iOS App Store — with almost half of those downloads taking place last year, underlining the momentum powering its mobile ecosystem. The 40 billion figure excludes re-downloads and app updates.
December was a record-breaking month for iOS app downloads, according to Apple, with more than two billion downloads during the period — doubtless fuelled by holiday iOS device sales. Apple said its App Store now has more than 500 million active accounts, and there are now more than 775,000 apps in the store, including more than 300,000 native iPad apps. iOS developers have made more than $7 billion via the App Store, it added.
“It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a statement. “Developers have made over $7 billion on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.”
Google’s Play Store for its Android smartphone platform achieved app parity with Apple’s iOS back in October, when there were 700,000 apps on Play. A recent estimate by The Sociable suggests Play will pass 1 million apps by June:

Tags: iOS apps, apple, iphone, iPad

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Apple gives Vancouver Olympic visitors a rare treasure

For some fans of the Olympic Winter Games, it's all about the beauty and grace of figure skating. For others, it's the organized chaos of short-track speed skating, or the aerial bravado of the half-pipe. And for some, it has nothing to do with the sports of winter. Instead, they're intent on pin trading and collecting.




While this may sound like an odd pastime, for some Olympic fans pin collecting is a huge deal. The official Vancouver 2010 website store lists 459 different pins for collecting and trading with others, but those aren't all of the pins that fans will find. Often, local businesses or organizations will make their own pins to give away or sell, and at these Winter Games, Apple joined in on the fun.



TUAW reader Alan Waite was in Vancouver earlier in the week to attend the Games and visited the Apple Store at Pacific Centre. Much to his surprise, Apple was giving away a limited edition set of pins (see photo above) to store visitors to commemorate the event. Very classy, Apple! Waite noted that the Apple Store at Oakridge Centre had a special red iPod nano pin with the Canadian maple leaf on the screen.



Custom pins like these aren't as common as the mass-market versions sold by the official Olympics website, so Alan not only has cool memorabilia from the 2010 Winter Games, but a relatively rare piece of swag as well.

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Full text searches on the iPhone? There WAS an app for that.

Sometimes you can't win for losing. A few weeks ago, I was talking to fellow blogger and all-around genius Brett Terpstra about how I wished there was a full-text search for iPhone mail. He told me that there was, and it was called reMail. I immediately downloaded the free app, paid the US $3.99 for the in-app feature of using IMAP mailboxes, and reMail started downloading copies of all my mail. This took overnight, but so what? When done, I could search on any word or term just like the Macintosh Mail application, and be rewarded with a listing of all the incidences of the term in my 3,000 or so email messages in a fraction of a second.




This worked like a dream. I immediately put reMail on my home screen and was happy. At least, that was, until last week when I read that Gabor Cselle, reMail's creator, announced that the app was being put out to pasture, and was immediately being removed from the App Store. Google both bought the app and hired Gabor to be a Product Manager on the Gmail team.



As a nice gesture, Gabor decided to keep supporting reMail until the end of March and make the two in-app purchases free. Along with IMAP support, you could also buy the option of having it work with Rackspace email. And thus started the conspiracy theories. Techcrunch surmised that this could be another shot over the bow in the Apple-Google smartphone war, and that Google bought the technology to kill it off, so Apple couldn't buy it first. There may be something to that since reMail is arguably a better mail app than the one that built into the iPhone.



On the other hand, it may be that Google, seeing a widening of the search market, wants to build reMail's functionality into another product. It would be foolish, in my opinion to not do so. Google has worked with Cselle before as part of the Gmail team and knows what he can do. With reMail as part of the bargain, he's more important to them than during his earlier tenure.



There is a rumor floating around that someone has reverse-engineered reMail and will release it as open source. This could be interesting and may change the game, but it may be just a rumor. Whatever happens, it'll be intriguing to keep your eye on the evolution of mail apps on smartphones, and to learn just what Google has in mind.

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Steve Jobs turns 55

It's February 24, 2010, which means that Steve Jobs has his 55th birthday today.




Not many people get to start up a company and then develop several completely new markets during their lives. Steve Jobs has been intimately involved with popularizing a number of devices during his lifetime: the personal computer (Apple II and Mac), the MP3 player (iPod), the smartphone (iPhone), and now the media tablet (iPad).



All of the Apple fans here at TUAW wish Steve a happy birthday and many more years of Thinking Different.

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Tune Runner rises to the top on a wave of free

There's been some interesting discussion in our comments section lately about Ngmoco's freemium model -- first they made headlines by endorsing it even to the detriment of one of their most popular games, and then they bought Freeverse and the conversation started up again. But while customers don't seem to like the freemium model very much, there's a growing number of examples that go the other way, and here's another: Appy Entertainment is a company that's been doing fairly well with a game called FaceFighter, but last weekend, they decided to drop the price of that game to free, and use the giveaway to promote their newest game, Tune Runner. And the plan worked extremely well -- after just a week, their original music game is rivaling Rock Band and Tap Tap Revenge for downloads.




FaceFighter hadn't been doing badly, but offering it up for free not only increased its downloads to several hundred thousand (which sounds like a lot for Appy), but put the new game in front of a whole bunch of people who otherwise might not have heard about it. And Tune Runner is a "freemium" app -- you get the first hit for free, and can buy more premium content inside the app. With an example like this, why would a developer not go with a freemium model? As Freeverse's CEO told us, customers may complain about the model, but assuming your game has the quality to support it, it's the best way to monetize the App Store's huge audience.



That's not to say that the paid model should be abandoned for good -- even Appy says they plan to release a paid version of their app with the in-app purchase content already unlocked. But for all of the murmuring about the freemium model, it certainly seems that customers' actions are different than words on the App Store.

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Carry the Moon in your pocket with this free iPhone app

Last week I was pleased to suggest some free astronomy programs of interest to star-gazers. This week, I'm at it again hoping that space or science buffs get a look at Moon Globe.




This very handy app gives you a complete map of our nearest space neighbor, showing you what is visible on any night and from any location. The on-screen display of the moon at the current phase is striking, and very detailed. You can zoom in or out with the usual pinch and stretch moves you are familiar with. It's easy to magnify up to 300 times with stunning detail. With a tap, you will see where spacecraft have landed on the moon and identify surface features like craters, mountain ranges and valleys.



The mosaic of pictures that make up the presentation are seamless, and the app gives you the tools to exactly match what you might see in binoculars or a telescope. That's really helpful, because some telescopes reverse the image left to right, or up and down. You can duplicate those views, so it is easy to match up what you are seeing with the display.



Clicking on surface feature or a spacecraft name will give you some information that is built into the app, or allow you to link directly to Wikipedia or launch a Google search.



There's a lot to like with this app, and with the moon overhead this week, there's a lot to explore. Moon Globe runs on the iPhone and iPod touch, and requires iPhone OS 2.0 or later.



The sky is no longer the limit. Check out some screen shots below.

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Aperture 3.0.1 available now in Software Update

Although Aperture 3 introduced a lot of new features, it also introduced a lot of bugs. Apple's support forums have been abuzz with reports of memory leaks and issues with the new Faces functionality. Aperture 3.0.1 has arrived in Software Update, and Apple's support document for the update details several fixes for its flagship photo-processing program. Hopefully it addresses the two biggest issues users have faced: virtual memory growing out of control and consuming all free space on the hard drive, and Aperture libraries being invisible in Media Sharing if Faces is activated.




Let us know how your update goes in the comments.



UPDATE: Many users are saying that if you are running the unactivated trial version of Aperture 3, Software Update will fail to install the update. Instead, you'll have to re-download the complete Aperture 3 trial, which has itself been updated to 3.0.1.

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Apple serves up 10 billionth iTune, smiles all the way to the bank

Whether you love it or loathe it, there is now no way to deny the spectacular success of Apple's iTunes Store. The proprietary digital media player, organizer and salesperson has just now recorded its 10 billionth song download, marking a truly unique achievement in the still nascent world of digital distribution. Congratulations to Apple, whose response has been to thank you all for spending so much cash and making El Steve look like the techno pied piper. Hit the source link to find out what the most downloaded songs of "all time" were... you might not be surprised by the top three, but you should definitely be horrified.

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iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 3 available now

The new beta version of the 3.2 SDK (beta 3, for those of you keeping track) is now available for download. The Apple developer site will likely be getting slammed over the next hour or two, so plan your downloads accordingly. The beta is available to all paid members of the iPhone developer program, with at least the $99/year membership. You will need your credentials to sign in and download the new SDK.




As usual, the new beta SDK is under NDA, so please go check out the details for yourself to get further information about the changes between this beta and the last. Good luck, and happy programming!

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Apple earns 5.5 percent total market share in France

Apple had a great holiday sales quarter in the US and now research firm Gartner is reporting similar good news from Europe. Specifically, Apple shipped 182,000 machines in the fourth quarter of 2009, giving it a 5.5 percent total market share in France. It should be noted that Apple didn't reach the top five in any other European country.




Overall PC sales declined throughout Europe in 2009, while Mac sales in the U.K. increased from 3.8 percent in 3Q 2008 to 5 percent in 3Q 2009. Gartner attributed the increase partly to the "halo effect." That's the common term for increased sales of Macs from PC owners who have purchased iPods or iPhones and find that they love the design and ease of use of the Apple devices.



The only manufacturer to out-perform Apple's growth in Europe during 2009 was Acer, which saw 35.5 percent growth.



Currently there are two Apple retail stores in France: Apple Store Odysseum in Montpellier and Apple Store Carrousel du Louvre in Paris.

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iPad confirmed to use PowerVR SGX graphics, Apple job posting suggests A4 chip will hit other products

It may not be as big a surprise as the A4 itself was, but Apple has now confirmed via the latest iPad SDK Beta 3 documentation that the iPad does indeed use PowerVR SGX graphics hardware as part of its custom system-on-a-chip, which flatly contradicts previous reports of A4 using Mali, and lines up with what our pal Anand Shimpi has been telling us lately. What Apple doesn't confirm, unfortunately, is exactly which chip in the PowerVR SGX family the iPad uses, so it's still at least possible that it could pack a bigger punch than the iPhone or iPod touch.




In related news, a recent Apple job posting has now also offered up the first hard evidence that Apple might actually be putting its huge investment in A4 to use other platforms besides the iPad -- shocking, we know. That job is for an Engineering Manager, who would lead a team focused on the "bring-up of iPhone OS on new platforms," and would otherwise be responsible for "low level platform architecture, firmware, core drivers and bring-up of new hardware platforms" -- experience with ARM-based SoCs is also an "additional success factor." Sound like the job you've been waiting for? Then hit up the link below for the complete details.

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