App Store (i OS) - History

History

The App Store opened on July 10, 2008 via an update to iTunes. On July 11, the iPhone 3G was launched and came pre-loaded with iOS 2.0.1 with App Store support; new iOS 2.0.1 firmware for iPhone and iPod Touch was also made available via iTunes. As of February 10, 2012 (2012-02-10), there are at least 1,100,000+ third-party apps officially available on the App Store.

As of January 18, 2011, the App Store had over 9.9 billion downloads, which was announced via the company's "10 Billion App Countdown". At 10:26 am GMT on Saturday, January 22, 2011, the 10 billionth app was downloaded from Apple App Store. As of July 2011, 200 million iOS users downloaded over 15 billion apps from its App Store.

The mean revenue per application is estimated to be US$8,700, although data is not publicly available. As of May 2011, Apple approved its 500,000th app and 37 percent of all apps are free with the average price $3.64. The distribution of price follows a power law distribution (the Zipf–Mandelbrot law). Prices can be freely chosen by sellers at multiple of US$1 minus 1 cent (99¢, $1.99, and so on).

After the success of Apple's App Store and the launch of similar services by its competitors, the term "app store" has been adopted to refer to any similar service for mobile devices. However, Apple applied for a trademark on the term App Store in 2008 which was tentatively approved in 2011. Later, in June 2011, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton, who is presiding over Apple's case against Amazon, said she'll "probably" deny Apple's motion that seeks to bar the Web retailer from using the "App Store" name. Later on July 6, Apple was denied preliminary injunction against Amazon's Appstore by a federal judge.

The term app has become a popular buzzword; in January 2011, app was awarded the honor of being 2010's "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society. Apple does not hold a trademark on, or claim exclusive rights to the term app, which has been used as shorthand for "application" since at least the mid-1990s and in product names since at least 2002, for example Google Apps (first introduced in 2006).

On October 20, 2010, Apple announced the Mac App Store which was eventually launched on January 6, 2011. It is similar to the one for iOS devices, only it has applications designed for Mac computers. The Mac App Store is only accessible by using Mac OS X 10.6.6 "Snow Leopard" or later.

The App Store is accessible from the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad via an iOS application by the same name. It is also the only way to directly download native applications onto an iOS device without jailbreaking the device. Web applications can be installed on these devices, bypassing the App Store entirely, but they tend to have inferior functionality. The store is also accessible through iTunes, and then on any operating system for which iTunes is provided (Mac OS X and Windows).

In February 2011, Apple announced its new subscription-based service, which will allow publishers the freedom to set the length and price of subscriptions. Previously, new magazine or news releases were sold on a per release basis. The new service allows publishers to sell content directly through their apps, allowing users to receive new content over specified periods of time. Furthermore, Apple will begin allowing publishers to not only distribute and/or sell their applications from iTunes, where revenues will continue to be shared (70 percent for the publisher, 30 percent for Apple), but also allow them to distribute their subscriptions directly from their websites, where no revenue will be shared with Apple.

During Apple's 2012 Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the App Store boasts 400 million accounts with registered credit cards, 650,000 available apps to download as well as "An astounding 30 billion apps" downloaded from the app store.

Following the launch of the iPhone 5, Apple updated the UI of the App Store, as well as the iTunes Store and iBookstore, in iOS 6. This was the first major overhaul since the App Store launch in 2008.

On January 7, 2013, Apple announced that there have been over 40 billion apps downloaded from their iOS App Store, with almost half of those downloads coming in 2012.

On February 1, 2013, Apple informed developers that they could begin using appstore.com for links to their apps.

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