1.5 Billion Downloads from the App Store in One Year

Apple announced yesterday that more than 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded with more than 65,000 apps now available at the App Store. This announcement comes after just one year of operation, reiterating Apple’s accelerated exponential growth.

A number of additional staggering statistics in Apple’s announcement are worth noting.

100,000 developers are members of the iPhone Developer Program and over 40 million iPhone and iPod touch devices that can run the apps have shipped.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality. With over 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

The latter portion of his quote is significant on a number of levels. First, the obvious, a strong statement to Apple’s competitor’s who have decided to emulate (a.k.a. copy) this software model for their respective mobile platforms, that this growth will indeed be difficult to duplicate, especially in light of how some of the aforementioned competitors treated (or neglected) developers (Verizon, Palm, RIM and Nokia) for their mobile platforms before the iTunes App Store existed.

Second, I think Steve Jobs is relishing this watershed moment as it was the very response he wanted for the original Mac when it debuted over 25 years ago.

At that time, the original Mac was overpriced with a paltry supply of memory and software. Developers did not warm up to the machine as Apple had hoped they would and initially failed to catch on with the public, which, among other factors, eventually led to Steve Jobs’s exit from Apple in 1985. I think that in some small way, he made peace with himself knowing that the decisions he made this time around (further enlightened by his experiences outside Apple), with the support of the right people that he recruited, have vaulted Apple to the dominant market position for a big chunk of the foreseeable future.

I really think he must be singing along to “My Way” by Frank Sinatra on his iPhone, smiling to himself thinking, “If they only would have listened to me then….”