Apple's Mac App Store has 100m reasons to be 'appy

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 13 December 2011 00:49

Your IT - Home IT

The appetite of Apple's Mac App Store users knows no bounds, with now over 100 million Mac apps having been downloaded 'in less than one year', according to Apple's 'appy announcement.

Apple's decision to build an app store into Mac OS X has clearly paid off, with over 100 million Mac apps having now been downloaded in less than one year.

Although Microsoft has publicly announced plans to deliver its own version of an 'App Store' in Windows 8, even though it presumably could have delivered one to Windows 7 users if it wanted to, Apple's decision to 'move early' - despite years of Linux distros offering app store equivalents - has been well rewarded.

This is especially interesting when you consider that much of the shine of developing for Windows has dissipated in favour of writing apps for mobile platforms, although Microsoft's entire Windows 8 efforts are clearly a major effort to re-invigorate development for Windows itself, and looks poised to be very successful.

However, while Microsoft looks poised, Apple is now lapping its competition, with the 'thousands of free and paid apps' generating a nice big figure of downloads that Apple is happy to tell the world about.

Apple has also popularised the concept of having a specific account, genereally tied to either a credit card, debit card, or iTunes stored value card, and lets you use the one account across your various iDevices.

This has made accessing and purchasing free and paid apps extremely simple for Mac users, just as it has for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone users before it, with Apple dubbing it a veritable 'revolution', pointing to the 500,000+ apps on the iOS App Store, the 18+ billion app downloads for iOS iDevices, and the 'more than 1 billion apps' that continue being downloaded each month.

Apple's senior veep of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, said that '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. 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.'

Apple also pulled in three of its software partners to offer some commentary on their Mac App Store experiences - Autodesk, Pixelmator Team and algoriddim.

Autodesk's Amar Hanspal, the senior veep of Platform Solutions and Emerging Business, said: 'With Autodesk products in both the App Store and Mac App Store, we can reach hundreds of millions of Apple users around the world. With our free AutoCAD WS and the more powerful professional drafting tools of AutoCAD LT, we're using the Mac App Store to deliver new products and reach a growing base of new Mac customers.'

 

Concluded on page two, please read on!