Other smartphone manufacturers may be rushing out their versions of Apple’s (AAPL) App Store — the latest being Research in Motion’s (RIMM) “App World” for the BlackBerry, set to open this month — but that hasn’t slowed the developers writing programs for the iPhone and iPod touch.
In fact, judging from the slope of the graph at right, the number of applications available for download seems to be accelerating.
The latest milestone: the 25,000th app, reached sometime overnight Thursday, according to the website 148Apps, which keeps a running count that updates automatically.
In mid-January, Apple announced that it had passed the 500 million mark in downloaded apps, but it’s hard to say exactly how many more have been downloaded since then. We do know, however, that the global addressable market of iPhones and iPod touches continues to grow apace. By one calculation (provided by reader KenC) it’s almost certainly larger than 23 million units. He includes 19 million iPhones (the 17+ million sold by end of 2008 plus at least 2 million more sold in January and February) and a minimum of 4 million iPod touches.
For a breakdown of the types of applications included in those 25,000, see 148Apps‘ Count by Category below the fold.
Meanwhile, see also:
