Over the past week or so, Apple (AAPL -1.22%) has been counting down to its 50 billionth app download. That milestone was hit yesterday, and this morning Apple announced that the winner of a $10,000 App Store Gift Card was Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio, who made the download. The app that did it was Say the Same Thing, a free word game.
Apple said users are downloading apps at a rate of 800 per second, which translates into more than 2 billion per month. Online services chief Eddy Cue noted that Apple has now paid out more than $9 billion to developers, which implies that Apple has collected nearly $3.9 billion from its 30% cut. This all comes less than five years since the App Store was launched in July 2008, starting with 500 apps.
The App Store now boasts more than 850,000 apps available to users in 155 countries, including 350,000 titles optimized for the iPad.
