In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the Apple App Store has recorded more than 60 million application downloads and about USD$30 million in sales since it went live a month ago. Developers have pocketed about USD$21 million with the top 10 developers taking about USD$9 million of that.
Jobs also has big expectations for the App Store. He figures that it could become a USD$1 billion marketplace at some point in time. But it is not expected to generate huge direct profits for Apple. Instead, Jobs sees it as a vehicle to sell more iPhones and wireless-enabled iPod touch devices.
“Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that,” Mr. Jobs said. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.”
The biggest hits have been the game Super Monkeyball by Sega Corp. with over 300,000 sales and a free drug encyclopedia from Epocrates which has been downloaded 125,000 times.
Jobs also confirmed that Apple had built into the iPhone functionality that allows Apple to remove software from its devices. Jobs explained that this was needed against malicious programs.