Apple Touts Latest Mac App Store Numbers

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Another day and another bit in terms of app stores. Except unlike the recent stories surrounding the Android Market app store, this one is focusing on the desktop. More specifically, it is focusing on the Mac App Store, which is not even a full year old at this point.

And just for reference, the Mac App Store opened on January 6, 2011 with only 1,000 apps. That being said, the details are coming by way of a recently released press release from Apple. And as we often see when Apple releases an announcement such as this — they are touting the numbers. In this case those numbers are 500,000, 18 billion and 1 billion. All rather large for an app store that is still so young.

Breaking each of those apps down a bit further and we have the following — more than 500,000 available apps with a total of 18 billion apps having been downloaded. And taking that a step further and it looks like users are now downloading apps at a rate of more than 1 billion per month. Of course, while the Mac App Store for desktop software seems to be a success, it may not have gotten off to such a quick start had users not already been familiar with the iOS App Store.

“In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.”

The Mac App Store is similar to that of the iOS App Store in that Apple offers a 70/30 split with the developer. And of that, the 70 percent is in the favor of the developer. It also appears as if developers are really liking the app store distribution method.

For example, we have seen Pixelmator 2.0 debut as an exclusive Mac App Store offering. On that front, Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team stated that “the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image editing software and stay ahead of the competition.” In addition, another app, djay, has also shifted to become available only in the Mac App Store. According to statements from Karim Morsy who is the CEO of algoriddim, by using this method their app is now available for customers in more than 123 countries around the world and that is something they could not have reached using “traditional channels.”