Steve Jobs might not be doing so hot, but his application store sure is. Think about this for a second. At the end of October, the app store had 5, 500 applications with 200 million downloads. By the beginning of December, there were 10, 000 applications with 300 million downloads. And now, according to some number-crunching by Jim Goldman, there are 15, 000 apps with 500 million downloads. That’s 5,000 new apps and 200 million downloads in under 6 weeks!
The download growth in December doesn’t surprise me. A helluva lot of people received iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s during the holidays and the sales spikes around Christmas were drastic. But 5, 000 new application in one month! It seems like the developer long tail is finally becoming comfortable with Cocoa.
Palm has shown some promise with webOS lately, but can its app store make inroads into Apple’s stunning growth?