Independent app store GetJar hits 500,000,000 mobile application downloads

GetJar announced it has passed the half a billion downloads mark today. As the world’s largest independent app store, this can be seen as good news for mobile applications. There are about 50,000 apps on the service now, all available completely free.
GetJar released a few metrics to go along with the release. There are a little over 1,500 devices supported by GetJar. It claims that only 20-30% of its app downloads are for smartphones. But that number is much smaller in emerging markets - GetJar sees much more use in India than Germany or France. And the iPhone doesn’t even register in India!

GetJar has rebranded slightly as well. You can see the new logo at the top of the article, as compared to the old one here:

From the release:

”GetJar’s success to date is the product of the innovation, hard work, and loyalty of our developer community – from small, two man teams in India to large-scale developers in the US or Europe. Making sure these developers have an open, free and quick way to get their content distributed globally is essential to provide the widest offering of quality apps to consumers,” commented Ilja Laurs, GetJar’s CEO and founder.

“We’re glad to see that apps created with Flash technology contributed to GetJar’s milestone,” said Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Adobe Flash Platform Business. “It’s important for Flash developers to look at services like GetJar to distribute their content to users across different mobile platforms and devices.”

“Opera has been working with GetJar for several years and we are most impressed by their success,” said Rolf Assev, chief strategy officer, Opera. “GetJar is one of Opera’s most important distribution partners with approximately 17 million downloads of Opera Mini.”

“GetJar offers RingRing Media the opportunity to market, in an instant, mobile apps to millions of new users worldwide,” stated Harry Derwhist, CEO and co-founder of Ring Ring Media. “Their attractive cost per download model eliminates any potential wastage, making the GetJar offering a very attractive one. Scale and value for money is exactly what RingRing Media clients expect.”

What we think?

Ok, so that’s a third the amount of iPhone apps downloaded. Also… its 500 million since the GetJar launch. In 2004. Which is less impressive. However, we usually get stories about people announcing how many apps they’ve had downloaded over GetJar. mig33, Opera and eBuddy have all had over 10 million hits from GetJar alone. So, yes, iPhone is kicking GetJars ass. But GetJar has been doing a huge amount more business since iPhone popularised mobile applications. All of those “10 million” stories have surfaced since the App Store. It may not be a real contender for the Apple monster, but it shows a surge of interest in applications worldwide.