Today marks the one year milestone for the Mac App Store. In 2011, Apple unveiled the Mac App Store on January 6th, 2011 with over 1,000 apps available at launch. Just like this year, CES was starting to ramp up. Apple stole the early thunder by announcing its app distribution system for OS X.
Steve Jobs told the world that, “We think users are going to love this innovative new way to discover and buy their favorite apps.” As it turns out, he was right.
The Mac App Store went live alongside OS X 10.6.6, and there was plenty of pre-release buzz surrounding high-profile apps like Twitter for Mac. Apple categorized and formatted the Mac App Store nearly identically to the iOS App Store, and user adoption skyrocketed.
Last month, Apple announced that the Mac App Store has served over 100 million downloads, and that figure didn’t even include Lion and re-download numbers. It was estimated that over 10,000 live apps existed in the store at that time.
It’s only taken Apple one year to propel the Mac App Store to the forefront of desktop software distribution. We can’t wait to see what this next year has in store.
Happy birthday, Mac App Store!
