Apple App Store clocks 50 billion downloads

Apple's App Store has added another feat to the list of its achievements, crossing the 50 billion app downloads milestone.

The information was conveyed through the countdown timer on the Apple website and through the App Store Twitter account. Apple has also said that it will soon announce the winner of the grand prize of the contest that it had announced celebrating the occasion.

(Update: Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio is confirmed to have won the $10,000 prize.)

"Apple would like to thank our incredible customers and developers for topping 50 billion apps downloaded," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. "The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers. We're absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years."

Apple had earlier announced that the customer who downloads the 50 billionth app will get a  $10,000 App Store gift card and  each of the next 50 people to download an app would get gift cards worth $500. Entry to the contest was also open through a Web-based contest which involved the filling up of a simple form to submit one's entry.

Interestingly, Apple's competitor, Google had announced that its Play Store had clocked 48 billion app downloads at its annual Google I/O event, a day back in San Francisco. So we can say that the gap between the two is not major, specially considering that Android launched after iOS, although the installed base of Android is much larger. Google had announced that there have been 900 million Android activations so far.

At last count, Apple's App Store offers more than 850,000 apps across 23 categories to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users with over 500 million actives iTunes accounts in 155 countries around the world, with more than 350,000 native iPad apps available.

A recent report by market research firm Canalys said that Apple's App Store generated $1.48 billion in revenue, accounting for roughly 74 percent of the $2.2 billion earnings that app stores across all mobile platforms collectively made in the first quarter of this year. Revenue generated from Google's Play store accounted for a relatively modest 18 percent.