Barely has a month gone by when Apple reached the 300 million mark in downloads from their App Store, and now, they’ve accomplished a new feat as it has surpassed 500 million downloads.

With now over 15,000 apps available, the numbers will no doubt continually grow especially now that they’re allowing more varied apps such as 3rd party internet browsers to be offered as well. Looking at its tremendous growth, it shouldn’t come as a surprise why the likes of Google, Microsoft and Palm all want to offer a similar service with their own mobile operating system.

Of course, not all of the downloaded apps are paid for as we've seen in the breakdown that a lot of the apps in the App Store are actually free, but with 500 million apps being downloaded, we're pretty sure that a significant number of those have been paid for nonetheless.

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