Today, the Apple App Store surpassed 1,000,000,000 app downloads. It reached this milestone after a little more than nine months in existence. It is significant, auspicious, and whatever other hyperbolic adjectives you’d care to stick into this sentence. It bears reflection, discussion, and outlook onto what this means for the mobile device space.

The iPhone app store came into being following the clamor for applications by the iPhone/iPod touch community. Weeks after the iPhone was released, developers found ways to crack into the firmware of the device, access APIs and create hardware driven apps for the device. Demand for a sanctioned SDK supported by Apple built up to near impossible levels. Finally, Apple relented and released an SDK, and announced the opening of the App Store with the release of the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software update.

The App Store was met with a skeptical eye by many, including yours truly. After all, with no background applications allowed, and many Jailbroken apps doing at least what the Apple sanctioned apps could do, why would people go to the App Store? And, how could Apple’s method succeed where others (Palm, Nokia, the app distribution methods created by the carriers) had failed? Well, people went to the App Store, and they went in droves.

The App Store took something which is patently not an original concept - applications built for a mobile device - and made them easy to access and purchase. Rather than going to a developers site, downloading a package, hooking your device up to your computer, transferring the files, setting up the package on your phone, configuring the settings and finally using the app, the App Store stripped out all of the processes and made it dead simple to use an app. Open the App Store, find the app you want, hit install, confirm your password, and the app installs and configures itself right there on your phone. Seamless, fast and easy. Better yet, in many cases the applications were reasonably cheap, making it trivial to pile up pages and pages (and pages and pages…) of apps. Apple succeeded by doing what they do best: taking an idea floating around there, refining it down to the simplest and most effective form.

Now that Apple has sold the billionth application from the App Store, what is in store for the future of the platform? Well, using the past nine months as an indicator, plenty of smooth times ahead. Apple has managed to capture the majority of the developer share for the mobile market, despite the sizable headstarts which Windows Mobile and Blackberry held over the App Store. With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, there are more API and tools available for developers to tool around with, and with the install base of the iPhone and iPod touch growing every day, there doesn’t seem to be an end to the massive success of the App Store.

Kudos, Apple, for taking my money. I look forward to paying you for an app to monitor my liver while racing 3D go karts against my friends.

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