Mobile and Wireless: Apple App Store Turns 4: A Look Back at the Numbers

July marked the fourth birthday of the Apple App Store, which has had a tremendous impact on everything from the way consumers and business people interact with their mobile devices, to the job markets for developers, to even the revenue models of the wireless carriers, which now offer themselves as both app store hosts and curators. Distimo, a Netherlands-based company that offers insight into the mobile app store market, has released a report on the App Store over these last four years. In it, the company notes that when the App Store launched, it had just 500 applications—and that Apple didn't invent the concept of such a store. It just perfected it. "Others [had] already launched similar products," Distimo wrote, "however, the tight integration of iPhone, the iPod and the Apple App Store worked in a simple, seamless way, whereas other app downloads from other app stores required difficult manual actions." Here, eWEEK parses some interesting statistics from the report as the tech world looks back at four years of Apple App Store, which helped changed the mobile world.