It doesn’t exactly rival Moore’s Law, but Apple has doubled the number of iPhone app downloads in about half the time it took to reach 1 billion. But unlike the fanfare which attended the 1 billion mark, we don’t know who downloaded the 2 billionth app or what it was — and this time nobody wins anything.
Apple announced Monday in a brief press release that it the 2 billionth iPhone app had been downloaded. It didn’t say when, exactly, but it’s a little more than five months since the 1 billionth was retrieved from the iTunes Store cloud. And that was nine months after what is now the largest application store in the world first opened its virtual doors.
On that occasion, April 24, we learned that 13-year-old Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Connecticut, had downloaded the billionth application, earning him tens of thousands of dollars in Apple hardware and software and the developer of the app, Bump Technology, a guaranteed spot in the next edition of Trivial Pursuit.
We asked Apple about the who’s and what’s of the 2 billionth transaction, but they replied that they were not going beyond the release. So all we know is that they’ve reached another milestone, and that download activity continues to grow. A lot. “The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering 2 billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in the four-paragraph statement.