Apple Announces Winner of App Store's 50 Billionth Download Contest
Apple today announced the winner of its "50 Billion App Countdown" promotion that saw the company pass that milestone on Wednesday afternoon.
Word game Say the Same Thing from the band OK Go was the milestone download, with Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio making the winning download. Ashmore will will receive an iTunes Gift Card worth US$10,000. For the first time, Apple also gave the fifty downloaders after the big winner US$500 iTunes Gift Cards.
“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 ran similar promotions for ten billion and twenty-five billion downloads, in January 2011 and March 2012 respectively.
The App Store took just under five years to hit the fifty billion download mark, though the rate of downloads has been accelerating and is now at more than 20 billion app downloads per year.
Popular Stories
Apple has yet to reveal when the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra will be announced and released, but the dates usually follow a familiar pattern.
As usual, the event is expected to take place in the first half of September.
Labor Day falls on September 7 this year. The last time the holiday was on that day was in 2020, but the iPhone event that year was delayed until October due to the...
Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate.
In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. "With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later," says the voiceover text.
Here ...
"iPhone Ultra" supply will be very limited when the foldable device is first released later this year, according to Fixed Focus Digital, a known leaker on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
The account also claimed that the iPhone 18 Pro's A20 Pro chip will be up to 18% faster and up to 30% more power efficient compared to the iPhone 17 Pro's A19 Pro chip. The A20 Pro chip will be the...
