Apple today announced another major milestone for its App Store business. The digital storefront for iPhone has had 100,000 apps created for it so far, and "well over" two billion apps have been downloaded by users in 77 countries.
"The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”
As was previously revealed, games on the App Store account for roughly 20% of the available content. That would mean that there are around 20,000 games on the App Store right now - and let's face it, when you have 20,000 games available, a lot of them are highly likely to be complete crap.
Nevertheless, mobile game companies are pretty happy with iPhone/iPod Touch platforms. “The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve,” said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. “With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers.”
Apple's certainly making its presence felt in portable gaming, to the point where analyst Michael Pachter believes that iPod Touch could be eating into DS/PSP sales.
