Apple’s hit a huge milestone today: it’s passed a staggering 50 billion downloads on the App Store for iOS devices, and one lucky winner’s picked up a massive prize along the way.
Since it launched in June 2008, more than 50,000,000,000 apps and games have been downloaded on the iTunes App Store for iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. That’s a staggering statistic: spread out over five years, that’s around 7,600 apps downloaded per second, averaged out over that time. And with the number of iOS devices out there far higher now than at launch, that number’s likely far, far higher now.Apple’s made a tradition out of awarding a big prize to the person downloading the milestone app, and it’s upping the ante in this respect once again: Brandon Ashmore from Ohio, who downloaded the app Say The Same Thing this week, has scooped a $10,000,000 App Store gift card for his troubles – that’s a lot of games of Candy Crush Saga.
While Apple’s App Store was not the first download store for smartphone apps, it was the easiest to use at the time, radically changing our expectations of what we use phones for, and turning applications and services into easy to access, easy to use apps available anywhere. Judging by the rate it’s going at in 2013, it’s still going from strength to strength.
