In 2009 the American dialect society selected “app” as the word of the year. By now, most of us now what apps are and at some point have used an app to accomplish something. Still, it’s amazing to think just how new the term is. Apps have really only become popular in the last five years or so.
The Apple app store opened on July 10, 2008 and immediately ushered in a period of prominence for the app. With the rise of the iPhone and its Android counterparts, apps would become immensely popular. The Apple app store, for example, has had more than 50 billion downloads and is home to over 850,000 apps.
Google Play comes in close behind with 48 billion downloads and 800,000 apps. Microsoft‘s app store, on the other hand supports only 145,000 apps and only a half million downloads. Talk about lagging behind your competition! Other companies, like Amazon, also run app stores, but they are not as popular.
Unsurprisingly, the Apple App store is the highest ranked app store, while Google Play comes in second. Microsoft does score a reasonable rank of number three.
The most popular type of app, by far, are games which account for 33 percent of all downloads. The next highest are widgets, which account for only 8 percent of all downloads!
And revenues derived from apps are booming and expected to hit 36.7 billion by 2015! There are a heck of a lot more details in this infographic by topapps, so if you’re interested in apps, you should check it out!
