App downloads up 16% per day

It’s taken Apple 81 days for its army of iPhone and iTouch users to download another 500 million apps from the App Store, in a little over a year, according to the latest numbers from Apple.

For the latest 500 million apps downloaded, that is an average app download rate of 6.17 million per day, compared to 5.3 million downloads per day for the previous 500 million downloads; an increase in app download traffic of 16% per day.nterestingly, with Apple confirming that there are now over 40 million iPhone and iTouch users globally, this means that over the 81 day period, on average each iPhone and iTouch user downloaded 12.5 apps. This represents a drop from the 16.67 apps downloaded per user during Q1 2009 or a 14% fall, though this period included an additional 10 days. However, this decline indicates that users are downloading less frequently, with the growth attributed to the sheer volume of users. The decreasing timeframe per 500 million downloads represents an acceleration in overall usage.

If Apple can maintain the growth it has demonstrated throughout the first half of 2009, it will take approximately 70-71 days for the company to record its next 500 million app downloads. In other words, Apple could be celebrating its 2 billionth app download on September 22nd to 23rd.

Apple has said that the App Store now houses over 65,000 apps, and over 100,000 developers are initiated in the iPhone Developer Programme. This suggests that a minimum of 35,000 members of the iDP are yet to release their app onto the marketplace.

Steve Jobs is under no illusions in terms of the impact the App Store has had on the mobile industry. “The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” he said in a company press release. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

To put this into context, if Apple and the App Store was indeed an operator’s portal, selling content at an average price of £3, and taking into account 80% of all content downloaded from the App Store is free, the operator would generate annual revenues of £900 million. Even applying the average price per app of £0.99, that would still generate revenues of £177 million.