Apple has launched a clock that is rapidly ticking up to mark the one-billionth iPhone download.
As of today, more than 930,000 downloads have been served around the globe. It’s expected to top 1 billion in 10 days or so, says MocoNews.
Apple also revealed a list of the top 20 paid and free applications of all time. The list differs from a comScore report released earlier this week that listed the top 25, but did not break them out by free and paid.
The number of smartphone users, currently about 25 million (mostly Apple iPhones), is expected to increase four-fold by 2013, according to market researcher, In-Stat. Apple’s iPhone applications store keeps growing, too. It now tops 25,000 applications.
On July 11, 2008, when Apple announced their 3G iPhone, they simultaneously opened the App store. By December, 2008, 300 million applications had been downloaded. By January, 2009, the App Store had over 15,000 applications and just three months later, in March 2009, it has already jumped to 25,000.
By 2012, Strategy Analytics projects that smartphones will comprise 30% of all handsets shipped, or about 452 million out of 1.5 billion handsets. By then Symbian will still hold 39% of the smartphone OS market, with Linux/Android at 22% and Apple at 18%.
With the Android smartphone and Palm’s Pre smartphone (set to debut this summer), In-Stat expects the number of users accessing mobile applications stores with their smartphones to reach nearly one-third, or 100 million, of all smartphone users.
But ABI Research estimates that overall worldwide handset shipments will fall by at least 8% in 2009, and that flat growth in 2010 is the best the market will deliver.
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