Apple's App Store hits 25 billion downloads

Apple cus­tomers have col­lec­tive­ly down­loaded 25 bil­lion apps from the App Store, the com­pa­ny has announced on its web­page. That’s more than three apps per per­son in the world.

The mile­stone sig­nals not only a vast appetite for apps, but also grow­ing smart­phone pen­e­tra­tion and Apple prof­its (the com­pa­ny takes a 30% cut from every app or in-app pur­chase).

Peo­ple with iOS devices are down­load­ing an increas­ing num­ber of apps. One 2011 study, for instance, con­clud­ed iOS own­ers down­load about 60 apps each, which is 50 more apps that the same researcher found each iOS owner down­loaded in 2008.

And as the num­ber of apps per device has grown, so has the num­ber of devices. In a 2011 Pew Sur­vey, 35% of the 2,277 U.S. adults ques­tioned in Eng­lish or Span­ish said that they owned a smart­phone. Pew released anoth­er study this week that found this per­cent­age has since jumped to 46%. More Amer­i­cans now own smart­phones than fea­ture phones, and the world bought 37 mil­lion of them from Apple last quar­ter alone.

Grow­ing app down­loads and grow­ing device sales are a bit of a chicken-and-egg sit­u­a­tion: Do peo­ple buy iPhones because they want to down­load apps or do they down­load apps because they have iPhones?

Com­bined net sales for the iTunes Store, App Store and iBook­store in 2011 was $5.4 bil­lion — just 6% of Apple’s net sales, but a 33% increase com­pared to 2010.

Whether devices are dri­ving app sales or the app store is dri­ving device sales (or, more real­is­ti­cal­ly, some com­bi­na­tion of both), grow­ing app demand and grow­ing mobile device pen­e­tra­tion have served Apple’s bot­tom line quite nice­ly.

The com­pa­ny report­ed its high­est rev­enue and earn­ings ever last quar­ter. If you go by its mar­ket cap, it is now worth more than all the tea in China.

In this con­text, the $10,000 gift card Apple promised to give away when it hit the 25 bil­lionth app from its App Store looks less over-the-top. Apple hasn’t yet announced the win­ner, but con­sid­er­ing that to enter the con­test, users were required to agree to pub­licly share some App Store picks with the Apple com­mu­ni­ty if they won, we’ll like­ly be meet­ing the lucky win­ner soon.