14 DAY TRIAL // The iOS App Store has paid the people who created its 550,000 apps over four billion dollars, Apple has confirmed.
After announcing the winner of its 25 billion downloads competition, Apple dished out some impressive figures today, including the hefty sum of money that the digital distribution venue has yielded for iOS developers thus far - a whopping $4 billion.
“The revolutionary App Store offers more than 550,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 123 countries around the world, with more than 170,000 native iPad apps available,” the company said today. […] The App Store has paid out more than four billion dollars to developers,” Apple confirmed.
The App Store opened in 2008 alongside the iPhone 3G. It became available for all iPhone and iPod touch users with the release of iOS 2.0.1 - an incremental software update to iPhone OS 2.0, as it was called at the time.
Apple’s Eddy Cue (SVP of Internet Software and Services) issued a sincere thank you to iOS developers worldwide today, as well as to end iDevice users, for helping the company set these incredible landmarks.
“We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded,” said Cue.
“When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users,” Cue added.
Apple provides an iOS software development kit (SDK) inside its free Xcode developer tool-bundle, so that anyone can code an iOS app and submit it to the App Store, provided that they also enlist in the Apple Developer Program for $99 a year.
In related news, Apple also recently named the top-25 paid and free apps for iPhone and iPad. Everyone can visit this specially designed section on iTunes to download la creme de la creme of iOS apps for their iDevice.