1 billion downloads can’t be wrong

Apple is celebrating their 1 billionth  download of one of their mobile applications from their App Store.

jtbrennen/flickr

Kudos to them, but important for our understanding is the general growth in application sales and downloads. Apple reached 1 billion downloads in 9 months. FierceMobileContent.Com reported that the research firm Compete said 17 percent of Iphone owners have downloaded more than 31 apps. Ten percent have downloaded between 30 and 21 apps, 18 percent have downloaded between 20 and 16 apps, 15 percent between 15 and 11 apps, and 22 percent have at least 10 to six applications on their Iphone.

Combined with the release of Research in Motions new application store for their BlackBerry phones, and the smartphone universe is quickly becoming saturated with applications for all sorts of things.

I think that armed with that knowledge, many newspapers and news media should concern themselves with developing easy to use applications that people actually want to download and use.

What’s most interesting is that non-Iphone users have hardly any applications, but perhaps for that reason are more likely to pay for them, according to Tech Crunch. This could mean that a media outlet that produces a moderately priced application for the non-Iphone market could enjoy high margins in initial sales, followed by a leveling off of the app’s price and an increase in advertisements that come with the content in the app.

-Tom Elliott