Hasta La Gadget!

Wowsers, that little App Store side project Apple has going on sure doesn’t seem to be settling down. After launching in July of ’08 and hitting 100 million downloads in September, the App Store has just crossed the 500 million download mark — a mere six months after opening. Compare that to the iTunes Music Store, which took two whole years to cross the 500 million mark, though to be fair we have little idea of the paid to free ratio of app downloads. There are over 15,000 apps in the App Store currently, and sure, 14,500 of them are crap, with the rest being tip calculators, but we gotta hand it to Apple for pretty much unprecedented success in the mobile download space — now let us download SNES emulators!

[Thanks, Richard]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

App Store hits 500 million downloads: thanks, iFart originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Only five months since Apple launched the App Store, and there are now over ten thousand apps. Don’t worry, we did the hard part, trying them out and picking the year’s best:

We already selected our 20 essential iPhone apps not too long ago—November 14, to be exact. That’s recent enough to still be fresh, but to those 20, we’re adding 10 more, several of which have debuted between then and now. As a package, they’re 30 apps every iPhone owner should take a close look at. They’re what we use every day, and many of them are free.

The complete selection of our previous 20 essentials plus the 10 new apps can be viewed in our special Bestmodo Phone App directory. If you’d like, you can peruse all of our first 20 here on one page, and also, see the new additions to the list separately here:

EasyWriter: It seems simple—you can type URLs in landscape mode with its larger, more luxuriously spaced keyboard. Why not emails? EasyWriter solved it. Free; $2.99 for Pro edition

Facebook: For Facebookers (um, everyone, right?) it’s essential—a beautifully designed, uber-functional implementation that’s always with you. Free

EverNote: Already a popular web service and found on other devices, Evernote does something that every location-aware cameraphone should be able to do: quickly take and store geotagged photos so you can remember stuff. Free

Google Mobile: Google Mobile was a solid app (but not particularly essential)—and then came voice search. Free

RjDj: A totally unique music application that processes sound from your environment and replays it according to a set program, creating a trippy, always-evolving soundscape. Free to try; $2.99 expanded version

VLC Remote: One of the first apps we loved was the iTunes Remote—now, the Swiss army knife of media players VLC has one of its very own. Free ad-supported simple version; $1.99 for more controls and no ads

Wikipedia Mobile: Finally, the definitive Wikipedia reader for the iPhone. $2.99

Night Camera: Thanks to its accelerometer, your iPhone knows when it’s being jiggled. Night Camera, simply and ingeniously, uses this data to make your low-light picture clearer. $0.99

Tweetie: Twitter apps: there are a lot of ’em. Tweetie, though, is the closest you’ll get to the Twitter desktop experience, and therefore our best of. $2.99

Recorder: While not the sexiest apps, a good solid voice recorder can be incredibly handy—especially if you are a handsome FBI investigator in the town of Twin Peaks. $0.99

Be sure to check out our 10 best iPhone games of 2008—if you haven’t already.