So I was reading some news today and found that the iphone app store has now hit 3 billion downloads.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10424 ... icksArea.0

That was fast.

So the app store opened on July 10, 2008.
It hit a billion downloads on April 24, 2009
It hit 2 billion downloads on Sept 28, 2009
Now today (Jan 5, 2010) its at 3 billion downloads.

What does that mean?
A lot. Hang on.

It means that this app store is wildly popular.
It also means that Apple has sold one billion apps since September 28 mark, thats only 98 days.

Perspective time! (aka excuse for math time)

1,000,000,000 app downloads in 98 days =

10,204,081 app downloads per day
425,170 app downloads per hour
7086 app downloads per minute
118 app downloads per second

Hot damn.

So whats this mean for Apple? Well...

Lets say that 95% of the apps downloaded are free.
I'll go out on a limb and call that a fair number. That means that only 5 percent of the apps downloaded are being paid for.

Now lets lowball and pretend that the average cost of each paid for downloaded app is only $1... and Apple gets 1/3rd (it does) of all apps sold (forgetting the $100/yr license fee for now)
Therefore:

5% of 10,204,081 = 510,204.05 (apps sold per day @ $1)

510,204.05 * .3 = 153,061.21 (Apples $ take per day)

$153,000 aint bad for a days work. So lets forecast a month then...

153,061 * 30 = 4,591,830 (monthly Apple profit from appstore alone)

ok, 4.5 million a month comes to about 54 million a year. (4.5 * 12)

Please note that these numbers are a bit skewed in that Im only taking into account the last 98 days, not the previous profits of the last 1 year, 2 months and 18 days since the app stores launch and the 2 billion download milestone (thats 445 days or 10,680 hours, or 640,800 minutes or 38,448,000 seconds if anyone cares.)

So congrats Apple, Im no Apple fan boy, but theres no arguing that those are some impressive numbers! Rock on!

-Feel free to check my math, I wrote this quick and on the fly. Comments Welcome as usual. You know the email. Thanks.