500 Million iPhone Apps Downloaded

As reported (and apparently predicted) by Softpedia, there has been more than 500 million iPhone applications downloaded from Apple App Store. That's 500 million multi-touch applications download! Apple App Store now hosts 15,000 iPhone applications which is just crazy.

To give you some context on that number, there were about 2 billion mobile phones sold in 2007 and 2008 combined, which means that there was one iPhone application downloaded for every four mobile phones (of any kind) sold in the past two years.

An acquaintance of mine who is also a angle/venture funder spent the entire summer last year researching the potential of funding an iPhone start-up and determined that it was too difficult to make a profit. When you consider that there are 15,000 applications (most of which are games) it's not surprising that only a small percentage of the applications are actually profitable. In fact, many of the 500 million downloads were probably free applications which generate no revenue at all.

That said, the fact that third party iPhone applications are so popular is complelling. While you may not be able to hit the jackpot creating and selling mass consumer applications, with the increasing popularity of iPhone (now out selling just about everything else) it makes it a wondeful platform on which to build additional value for existing customers.

A while back I went looking for a decent book on iPhone development (I prefer books when getting started with a new technology) and found nothing of much interest. Yesturday, however, Slashdot.org posted a very positive review of "Begining iPhone Development: Exploiting the iPhone SDK". I took a look at the Amazon.com reviews and they are excellent with (as of today) 48 reviews avergaing 4.5 out of 5 stars. I've been writing books sold on Amazon.com for 10 years and I can tell you first hand that that is an very impressive score. Kudos to the authors Jeff LaMarche and Dave Mark as well as Apress!

The bottom line is that iPhone remains that most commerically successful multi-touch device in history and will probably remain so for some time to come (five years at least). Thanks to the iPhone multi-touch is a main stream technology.