The Palm Pre App Catalog has passed 1 million downloads, ad analytics company Medialets is reporting.  

On June 6, the day the Palm Pre went on sale, the Palm App Catalog offered just 18 applications but saw 93,435 downloads. Since then, the downloads and app numbers have been onward and upward, and Medialets has put together the type of 45-degree-angle, steady-growth chart that could make a CEO cry, showing the App Cat’s day-by-day progress.
 
By June 8, downloads were already at 252,193, which more than doubled by June 13, reaching 517,170. By June 18 downloads surpassed 700,000, by June 20 they topped 800,000 and June 24 they leapt over the 1 million mark, with 1,015,038 downloads of now 30 available applications.
 
Palm sold about 50,000 Pre smartphones before stocks were depleted, and according to Medialets’ math that’s an average of 2 apps per device and 5,500 downloads per app.

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Further, Medialets reports that 18 days later Palm tripled its user base to 150,000 Pre devices, which adjusts the math to 6-plus downloaded apps per device and 33.3 downloads per application.  
 
Additionally, Medialets says that, to compare Palm's experience against Apple's, the Apple App Store hit 1 million downloads 17 days sooner than the Palm App Catalog did — but at the time, Apple had 16 times the number of apps on offer and 26 times the number of devices doing the downloading. (In April, the App Store cruised past 1 billion downloads.)
 
 “Still comparing at the 1 million mark, the average Palm Pre user had downloaded [26 times] the number of apps that iPhone users had, and the average app in the App Catalog experienced [16 times] the number of downloads that apps in the App Store had experienced,” Medialets reports.
 
However, an Apple-to-Palm comparison isn’t a perfect one, since the culture of casually downloading applications to smartphones that the Palm Pre was born into was of course created by Apple and the iPhone.
 
The more sure news is that this is a good day for Palm, which has been told over and over again that attracting developers and building its application offerings are fundamental to the Pre’s success.
 
“That’s one reason they’re publicizing it,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “They want to drive the development of apps. There’s been a large adoption of handsets as app platforms, and right now the market is expanding at a great pace.”
 
Gottheil continued, “This will help move the Pre further up in the cycle of having users downloading programs…which brings more users and so on. This is absolutely good news for the Pre.” 

Editor's Note: New text has been added for greater clarification.