Apple’s App Store just announced it has passed the 25 billion downloads mark in conjunction with its recent “25 Billion Apps Downloaded” celebration event. The 25 billionth app was downloaded by lucky winner Chunli Fu in Qingdao, China who received a $10,000 gift certificate for iTunes Store downloads as his prize. The Disney iOS game “Where’s My Water? Free” was the app that pushed the number to the milestone mark according to a counter Apple had been running simultaneously on its website and app store.
Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services, Eddy Cue, said “We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded.” Cue also noted that in the beginning Apple did not foresee that mobile apps would become such a popular phenomenon or that developers would end up create such a wide variety of apps for iOS users. This fact is also backed up in Walter Isaacson’s biography of former CEO Stephen Jobs wherein it is revealed that Apple’s executives had to push hard to convince Jobs that the proliferation of apps would enhance the iPhone instead of harming it.
Apple has sold more than 315m iOS devices since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, and today the rate of downloaded apps has reached an astonishing 1.25 billion a month, or 41.6 million per day.
In the face of Apple’s market domination, second-place Google’s Android Market store just announced it has reached the point of generating 1 billion monthly app downloads. As part of the “25 Billion Apps Downloaded” event, Apple also released lists of the top 25 free apps that were downloaded for both the iPhone and the increasingly popular iPad.
Top 25 Free iPhone Apps:
1. Facebook
2. Pandora Radio
3. Words with Friends Free
4. Skype
5. The Weather Channel
6. Google Search
7. Google Earth
8. Angry Birds Free
9. Shazam
10. Netflix
11. Paper Toss
12. Twitter
13. Movies by Flixster
14. Bump
15. PAC-MAN Lite
16. Flashlight.
17. Unblock Me FREE
18. Temple Run
19. Instagram
20. Touch Hockey
21. Angry Birds Lite
22. ESPN ScoreCenter
23. Fruit Ninja Lite
24. Groupon
25. Angry Birds Rio Free
Top 25 Free iPad Apps:
1. Angry Birds HD Free
2. The Weather Channel for iPad
3. Netflix
4. Skype for iPad
5. Kindle
6. ABC Player
7. Pandora Radio
8. Angry Birds Rio HD Free
9. CNN App for iPad
10. Words with Friends HD Free
11. Google Earth
12. Calculator Pro for iPad Free
13. Fruit Ninja HD Lite
14. Calculator for iPad Free
15. NYTimes for iPad
16. USA TODAY for iPad
17. Facebook
18. MyPad for Facebook & Twitter
19. Flipboard
20. eBay for iPad
21. Angry Birds Seasons HD Free
22. Dictionary.com
23. Twitter
24. Solitaire
25. Friendly for Facebook
