On July 10, 2008, Apple opened up the App Store as part of the iTunes experience for owners of the iPhone and iPod Touch. The idea was to give users a marketplace for licensed, third party software, and in turn to give developers a place to sell the applications they had developed for the devices. In the intervening year and a half, 125,000 registered developers have created over 85,000 apps for an audience of 50 million users. And today, Apple has announced that yesterday, the 2 billionth app was downloaded.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, likely sitting atop a mountain of gold bars and flossing his teeth with silk taken from an extinct silkworm, had this to say of the McDonald's like sales number, "The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone. The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it."

By anyone's accounting, two billion downloads in under two years is a hell of a feat. And while I'm sure that there are plenty of people using the restaurant finders, guided tours of Paris, and subway maps that we see on all the commercials, it's probably worth noting that those users are more than likely dwarfed by the number of people downloading fart noises, drinkable beer simulators, and levels.

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