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Apple's App Store Hits 25 Billion Downloads: How Many Per iPhone?

Apple's crossed the 25 billion download mark: One lucky user gets a $10,000 gift card and one lucky app developer gets some spotlight.

March 3, 2012

Quick: Someone fire up the Fireworks App. Apple announced early this morning – via its website – that its App Store has officially hit the 25 billion app download mark.

"A billion thanks. 25 times over," reads an announcement on the site. "The App Store has reached 25 billion downloads. Thanks for getting us there."

As for which lucky App Store downloader won the big prize for tapping "install," Apple is asking interested parties to visit the official "25 billion app countdown" site at a later date to see who will be taking home the $10,000 App Store gift card. Apple will undoubtedly detail which app was the 25 billionth download at that time as well, which could lead to a bit of a boost for the lucky developer.

Apple's 10 billionth app download, Paper Glider, was already a fairly well-known app prior to achieving its little place in Apple App Store history.

"Whilst app downloads of Paper Glider might not have experienced a huge shift after Apple's announcement, [Neon Play Managing Director Oli Christie] could not have imagined the response from the media and from potential clients," wrote The Next Web's Matt Brian in January of last year. "Within two days of the announcement, Neon Play received numerous enquiries from digital marketing agencies and has already undertaken at least three projects as a result."

According to Gartner, Apple jumped up to take third in overall worldwide phone sales in 2011, nearly doubling its market share from 2.9 percent in 2010 to 5.0 percent in 2011. Drilling down to smartphones, Apple was number one with a bullet by achieving a total smartphone market share of 19 percent.

A report by Telenav, released in August of last year, indicated that iPhone users were twice as likely as Android users to spend more than $40 total on apps for their smartphones. And only 45 percent of iPhone owners – versus 62 percent of Android owners and 63 percent of Blackberry owners – said they have never paid more than $1 for any app.

Data pulled between July and December of 2010 by Appsfire indicates that iPhone users use apps for a median of 84 minutes per day. And on their iPhones sit a median of 108 apps in total: 20 that come preinstalled with the iPhone and 88 that users download from the App Store. A separate report released by Asymco in 2011 puts the total number of apps downloaded per user at 60 (at the time). But the more intriguing number is this statistic's growth rate: It's not shrinking by any means.

For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).