Yesterday was the Apple App Store’s 1 year-old birthday, and there are now over 25,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In January this year, Apple announced that its App Store has reached a major milestone: 15,000 apps available online. Only two months later, App store is at 25,000 apps! This is simply phenomenal.

iphone_apps_chart

And judging from the curve, the number of apps only seem to be accelerating. Apple’s competitors are scrambling to deliver their own version of App Store, like Windows Market, BlackBerry Apps World and Android Market, but it remains to be seen whether they will be able to recreate a similarly successful ecosystem.

Having a large army of developers and large number of quality apps are huge advantages for the iPhone as a platform. After all, one could argue those were the same major success factors that caused a 90%+ adoption of Windows. But this is a dual edged sword in some ways as well, because Apple will need to balance between keeping compatibility (to keep apps working) and innovating (sometimes breaking compatibility) on the platform.

The success of the App Store is remarkable in many ways. There is a rather high hurdle to iPhone development. To name a few:

  • You can only write apps in Objective-C which is not a very popular language. Developers most likely need to learn this new language.
  • You need a mac.
  • Tools are inferior compared to tools from Microsoft or the open source community.

Yet Apple is having tremendous success with the App Store. This proves how powerful it is when you have a breakthrough product and an easy way for developers to monetize their work. Bravo!

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