Besides hardware competition among Apple mobile and Android devices, there is competition among app downloads also and both the platforms are in neck-to-neck race going by the figures released by Apple and Google.
According to Apple, its customers have downloaded more than 50 billIon applications from its App Store since its launch in 2008. Apple said on Thursday that the 50 billionth download was a game called Say the Same Thing by Space Inch. The latest statistics provided by Apple show that the most popular paid-for app of all time is Angry Birds, while the most popular free app in the history of the store is Facebook.
It has taken Apple only 14 months to go from 25 billion to 50 billion downloaded apps, and the company is quick to stress that the totals do not include updates or re-installs, just unique apps. That works out at 800 app downloads a second, every second. Apps range from newspapers and magazines to games, business tools and travel applications.
No one, not even Steve Jobs could have predicted the impact that apps would have on modern, connected life. Apple’s first iPhone was launched in 2007 without apps. The App Store didn’t open its virtual doors until July 2008 and when it did, iPhone and iPod touch users had a mere 500 apps to choose from. Today, that number has swollen to over 850,000.
In this race of apps, Google is not far behind. Google has announced at its developer conference that its Android App Store – Google Play had 48 billion app downloads till date. With fast pace of growth of Android devices Google Play is very likely to overtake Apple’s App Store in number of app downloads soon.
