Happy First Birthday App Store!

This coming Saturday, July 11th the App Store officially turns one year old. All iPhone and iPod owners can be proud to know that the website they visit to download their applications has survived all the copycats and has remained on top as number 1 for a full year.

The App Store contains over 50,000 different applications, and it’s not just games and music that can be downloaded to you iPhone or iPod. There are books, news, photography, sports…the list really is quite long, so maybe you should just go to see for yourself. Everyone can find something that interests them, whether you are a game playing teenager, or a corporate finance manager.

The store opened on July 10, 2008 but the iPod Touch software 2.0 was not available yet, making all the applications unusable. The next day Apple released a new device, the iPhone OS 2.0, allowing downloads to this device. 10 million downloads were recorded on the first weekend, and today there have been over 1 billion downloads. The rest is history, so to speak. The store became so popular that everyone was trying to get web stores that could compete with the App Store, but to no avail.

For parents who are concerned about what their children are downloading, there are ratings on the downloads. There is a description on each rating that is clear to the parent as to the nature of the download. All applications have to be approved before they are released to the public for download. There have only been a few downloads that were released and subsequently pulled from the website soon thereafter by Apple due to inappropriate nature.

Over the years Apple has proven time and time again that they can compete with the best and stand the test of time. With all their different products and applications available for business and personal use today, we can tip our hats to Apple as we wish their 1 year old App Store a “Very Happy Birthday!”