People visiting the Apple website in recent days will have been struck by the dials counting app downloads, as they tick up to 50 billion.
This equates to more than seven apps owned by every person in the world.
The well-orchestrated publicity stunt by Apple serves to remind people of reasons to stay excited about the company (as well as concerned about its influence), after its stock entered a well-publicised swoon.
A January release revealed Apple had more than 500 million accounts and had more than 40 billion downloads, indicating at that point the average user had downloaded 80 apps. This means App downloads themselves have grown 25% in roughly four months, and you can easily bet that the average app per user will pass 100 some time soon.
Given Apple takes a 30% cut of the revenues of the app store, and its software business (which also includes iTunes music) grew 30% to $4.1bn revenues in Apple’s second quarter year on year (YOY) it is easy to imagine Apple securing a very sizeable revenue stream from apps and other software.
This is a big software company in its own right. To put these revenues in perspective, in their most recent quarters social network Facebook’s revenues rose 38% YOY to $1.46bn, while search engine Google’s revenues grew 31% YOY to $14bn.
The other big point, of course, is that companies themselves are proliferating on the back of this app growth. As is well-documented, a programmer who can score a hit in the app store can create a hot company, even if they are a three man start-up.
From a corporate venturing perspective this means there will be a lot of upcoming young turks to keep track of, and some should receive investments from established companies.
The Apple app store’s impressive growth suggests what lies ahead in our mobile future. Welcome to a brave new world of mobile giant, software oligopolists.