As we told you on Wednesday, Apple’s App Store just hit a huge milestone – 50 billion total app downloads (excluding re-downloads and updates, of course). Today, they made it official with a release that mentions a couple other interesting facts.
Count one second. Good. In that time, 800 apps were downloaded from Apple’s App Store. That pace means that every month, Apple now sees more that 2 billion app downloads.
“Apple would like to thank our incredible customers and developers for topping 50 billion apps downloaded,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers. We’re absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years.”
In honor of this milestone, Apple gave away a prize for the lucky person who just happened to download number 50,000,000,000. His name is Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio, and the lucky app was Say the Same Thing, a word game that lets you and a friend bridge word gaps to find common ground. Today, he’s the proud owner of a $10,000 App Store gift card.
This isn’t the first time Apple has done this sort of promotion for a big milestone. Back in March of 2012, when Apple hit 25 billion app downloads, they gave away another $10,000 gift card to a Chinese man who downloaded the popular puzzle game Where’s My Water.
Apple says that the App Store currently boasts over 850,000 apps. They’ve come a long way from the 500 that they started out with way back in 2008.
If you were wondering, the most popular apps of all time out of those 50 billion downloaded are Angry Birds (paid) and Facebook (free).