Apple this week announced that its App Store has passed 40 billion unique app downloads, excluding re-downloads and updates. Impressive for sure, but even more notable is that nearly half of those downloads occurred in 2012 alone, thanks to record numbers of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches sold. December 2012 was Apple’s biggest download month ever, with over two billion downloads.
In June of 2012, Apple announced that the App Store had hit 30 billion downloads and 650,000 apps available. By the end of 2012, the store housed over 775,000 apps including more than 300,000 native iPad apps, and had more than 500 million active user accounts in 155 countries.
Although Apple says that developers raked in over seven billion dollars from App Store sales this past year, fully half of that money pile went to only the top 25 app developers, according to a recent report by research firm Canalys. While there are certainly some inspirational developer success stories out there, the reality is that very few developers get rich from the App Store or any other marketplace.
Given that half of Apple’s app downloads have occurred in the last year alone, we can expect to see an even greater acceleration in app downloads in 2013, according to Flurry Analytics. The research firm last week predicted that over 52 billion mobile apps will be downloaded on both iOS and Android platforms between now and the fourth quarter of 2013 — an average of one billion downloads each week. At that rate, we’re likely to see Apple’s App Store hit 50 billion downloads by April.
After 2013, Flurry predicts an average of two billion apps to be downloaded to Android and iOS devices each week. So, should you give up your day job to become an app developer? Probably not. But if you have a great app idea, now’s the time to make it happen.
