Apple See 1.5 Billion App Store Downloads In First Year

It took Apple nine months to hit the one billion apps mark; now the company has announced that more than 1.5 billion titles have been download from the App Store.  That's in just the space of a year, with more than 65,000 apps available and in excess of 100,000 developers registered in Apple's official program.

As you might expect, the news has given Apple CEO Steve Jobs something to crow about. "The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality," said Jobs. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."

The news certainly throws the gauntlet down for rival platforms like those on the Palm Pre and Android handsets, neither of which are exactly overflowing with software in comparison.  In fact the only other mobile platform which stands a chance of competing is Windows Mobile, a fact which Microsoft are only just waking up to with the imminent advent of the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.