Apple’s to Celebrate 50 Billion Apps Downloaded Soon

Apple will soon reach the significant milestone of 50 billion apps downloaded from the iTunes App Store. They have decided to commemorate the event by celebrating what brought them to this point: the downloading of apps. The app store lists The Top 25 All Time Apps downloaded for both free and paid apps. The lists include the usual suspects, like Angry Birds, at the top of the paid iPhone apps list and Facebook at the top of the free apps. The list also has a few surprises and some head scratchers.

It was only January of this year that the store hit 40 billion apps. If it’s about to hit 50 billion, that means it has seen ten billion downloads in just four months. That also means Apple will likely hit the 60 or 70 billion mark by year’s end, if they keep up the same pace. Though we do have to wonder if this includes re-downloads on separate devices, or only new ones? Does installing Facebook on an iPad mini and each generation of iPad count as one download or five?

To see the list on the iPad, fire up the App Store on an iOS device and look for the link advertising the App Downloads “Countdown to 50 Billion” link graphic that appears on the left side of the store, as shown below. Tap it to see the countdown animation and the two lists.

Apple offers four different lists, one for each style of app. Paid and unpaid iPad apps, as well as paid and unpaid iPhone apps. Users who look on their iPad will see the iPad lists, and on the iPhone users see the iPhone lists, which seems obvious. Look in the desktop version of iTunes to see all of the lists.

Note that at the top of the list of paid apps we find Apple’s Pages word processor app on the iPad side. Angry Birds wins on the iPhone side. Angry Birds, in all its forms, makes up ten percent of the total spaces, or ten of 100, on all four lists. Apple only grabs six of the 100 spots.

We won’t republish the lists, since users can find them on their device by following this link. We expected to see Angry Birds and Facebook toping the two app lists on iPhone. We find it interesting that Skype hit the top free app on the iPad.

Other surprises include the following:

• Doodle Jump at number 3 on paid iPhone list seems high
• What’s App Messenger, a texting replacement, at number six on paid iPhone list
• The Moron Test at number 14 on paid iPhone list
• iHeartRadio at number 19 on free iPhone list
• Where’s My Perry at number 24 on paid iPad list

We also expected to see apps like Penultimate, Evernote and IMDB on one of the lists. Did any of the apps on the list surprise you? Let us know in the comments below.