Five Years of the App Store
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Five years ago today, on July 10, 2008, Apple launched the App Store. When the virtual doors were opened, the App Store proudly included 500 apps. Just a few months later, when iPhone J.D. started, there were 10,000 apps available. A year later, there were 100,000 apps available. By the Fall of 2011, there were over 500,000 apps available. Today, there are over 900,000 apps available, and it won’t be long before there are a million apps in the App Store.
Apple didn’t invent the idea of buying software for a mobile device — back in the day, I purchased quite a few apps for my Palm Treo 650, including Documents to Go, an app that I still use today on the iPhone — but Apple made it so easy (and comparatively inexpensive) to purchase apps, and gave developers such a great platform for releasing apps, that nobody can deny that Apple’s App Store was a game-changer.
In fact, Apple thought that the “App Store” was so much its own that when Amazon came out with an “app store” for Android devices, Apple sued Amazon, claiming that the term was its alone. Yesterday, on the eve of the fifth anniversary, Apple dropped the lawsuit, stating: “We no longer see a need to pursue our case. With more than 900,000 apps and 50 billion downloads, customers know where they can purchase their favorite apps.”
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