Apple's hugely successful App Store passed more than 100 million downloads, the company reported.
Apple announced that more
than 100 million applications have been downloaded from the company's App Store
in less than one year. Featuring thousands of free and paid applications-the
store now has more than 500,000 applications total-customers have downloaded
more than 18 billion applications and continue to download more than 1 billion
applications per month.
Amar Hanspal, senior vice
president of platform solutions and emerging business at Autodesk said with
Autodesk products in both the App Store and Mac App Store, they can reach
hundreds of millions of Apple users around the world. "With our free AutoCAD WS
and the more powerful professional drafting tools of AutoCAD LT, we're using
the Mac App Store to deliver new products and reach a growing base of new Mac
customers," he said.
The Mac App Store offers
thousands of applications in education, games, graphics and design, lifestyle,
productivity, utilities and other categories. Users can browse new applications,
look up top charts for paid and free applications, as well as user ratings and
reviews. The store is included with Mac OS X Lion and is available as a
software update for any Mac running Snow Leopard. Mac developers set the prices
for their applications, keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, are not charged
for free applications and do not have to pay hosting, marketing or credit card
fees.
"The Mac App Store has
unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and
development cycle," said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. "Offering
Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates
to our image-editing software and stay ahead of the competition."
Small businesses rely
increasingly on mobile applications for their companies, according to an
AT&T Small Business Technology Poll released earlier this year. The
national survey of small businesses (with two to 50 employees) revealed that 72
percent indicate they use mobile applications in their business, with roughly
38 percent reporting they could not survive-or it would be a major challenge to
survive-without mobile applications.
The driving force behind the
widespread adoption of mobile applications for business is time savings,
increased productivity and reduction of costs. Moreover, GPS/navigation and
mapping mobile applications are by far the most popular, with 49 percent of the
respondents reporting they use them for their small business.
Overall, smartphones and
tablets represent more than 90 percent of the new net growth in device adoption
for the next four years. Additionally, increasing application platform
capability across all classes of mobile phones is spurring a new frontier of
innovation, particularly where mobile capabilities can be integrated with
location, presence and social information to enhance the usefulness.
Innovation is moving to the
edge for mobile devices, according to a December report by IT research firm
Gartner, whereas, in 2011, the firm estimated application-development projects
targeting PCs to be on par with mobile development. Future adoption will triple
from 2010 to 2014, and will result in the vast majority of client-side
applications being mobile only or mobile-first for these devices.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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