Apple App Store, a billionaire (tech) story that today looks to the virtual world
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A passage in the tech economy that cannot fail to go down in history: it was July 10, 2008 and Steve Jobs announced to Usa Today the birth of the App Store, the third-party application store dedicated to the iPhone and iPad. It contained 500 and in the first week the downloads concluded by Apple loyalists were 10 million. In mid-January 2009, the Cupertino-based company formalized the milestone of 500 million applications sold and for the billionth it was not long to wait, on April 23rd. Important numbers, which mark the history of Apple but also that of the technology industry as a whole, because with the launch of the App Store the app economy was born and a revolution took shape that perhaps had no equal in the following 15 years , in which cloud computing and Big Data have become the cornerstones for an innovation process that has traveled ever faster, but perhaps without the “disruptive” effect that Apple’s digital store and that of its great rival Google have had. Until today, at least, with the introduction of generative artificial intelligence and the impacts that this technology will have on people, jobs, business processes and business models.
As always very adept at exploiting anniversaries, Apple’s communication took advantage of the now imminent WWDC 2023 edition (the annual conference for developers scheduled for June 5) to highlight the results achieved by the Store on the eve of its fifteenth birthday . Among the many figures disclosed by Cupertino, the most important remains that of the value of this ecosystem: the turnover in 2022 (according to data collected by Analysis Group) reached 1.1 trillion dollars, with a leap forward by 29% compared to 2021. An enormous figure, which supported the accounts of the Californian giant as much as (with due proportions) the sales of iPhones and which found lifeblood in the constant work of updating the catalog of the proposed apps.
How many apps are in the Apple store?
Today the App Store has about 1.8 million apps, a number 123 times higher than the thousands available at the end of 2008 and which is expected to grow rapidly in the coming months in relation to the expected launch of the first mixed reality headset of Apple, which should open the door to a new generation of applications. Few people know, perhaps, that over the years the number of apps rejected by Apple for reasons of security, quality of performance, incorrect design or legal implications has been equally important (almost 1.7 million) and only a portion of these are been re-approved at a later time, after the developers have made the necessary changes for their publication. In other words, the Cupertino engineers blocked hundreds of thousands of scam apps before they arrived on the App Store (some escaped the checks but they are exceptions) and removed them from the opening of the store to today just under 200 thousand (because they no longer comply with the marketplace guidelines) to preserve the integrity and reputation of the platform and of the entire ecosystem.
From the launch of the iPhone to the birth of the app economy
If the App Store was as successful as it was, the “credit” goes to the other great revolution that Jobs pulled out of the hat during his second life at Apple. The first iPhone model saw the light in 2007 and with it the iOS software and the magical world of smartphone apps. Curious anecdote: in the first versions of the operating system, the app dedicated to the App Store was not integrated because according to Jobs’ initial intentions, the developers could have created web-apps for the iPhone without using development kits. The choice was soon repudiated and the introduction of a dedicated SDK the following year, in view of the launch of the iPhone 3G, effectively marks the birth of the digital store. Its fortune is therefore linked to very specific technological matrix strategies, such as the one (from 2009) which introduced the possibility of inserting in-app purchases for developers, giving way to a business model, the freemium one, still today the most used (about 96% of existing apps are in fact free). Another important milestone dates back to 2010, the year of the debut of the first iPad with its own dedicated App Store, complete with 2,000 applications available at launch (a number that tripled within a few months). And then 2011, when the Mac App Store was launched, from which a million apps were downloaded in just one day: from then on, the new iMac and Macbook computers would gradually eliminate optical readers for DVDs and Blu-Rays and decisively focused on downloading any app through the App Store or from other online stores and services. Overall, from 2008 to 2022, the turnover of iOS developers exceeded 320 billion dollars on the App Store (among the developers who earned over a million dollars in 2021, 45% just five years earlier did not propose any app or had less than 10,000 dollars with the store), the economy that revolves around apps for iOS has given work to a few million people in Europe alone (including Web designers, programmers, creatives and other figures) and the devices of ecosystem that benefit from the apps in the catalog are 1.8 billion in 175 countries. It doesn’t take much to understand that something important in the history of the technology industry happened in July of 2008. History in which ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligences have come overbearingly to ask for space.
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