• New York Times et al., Monday, September 28, 2009 2:04 PM

There's no question that the app-happy mobile Web is finally taking hold of U.S. consumers, and that Apple is largely responsible. Indeed, its iTunes store just served up its 2 billionth app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Therefore, the big question is ... Well, there seem to be quite a few of them.

"The rate of change is pretty astounding for a consumer product," marvels Venture Beat, which, it adds, "raises the question as to whether anyone can catch up with Apple in smart phone apps."

BusinessWeek's Byte of the Apple blog concludes: "It's hard to take too seriously all the complaints about the App Store being unfriendly to developers."

Regarding those pesky developers, GigaOm writes: "On April 24, 2009, there were 35,000 applications in the iTunes app store, showing that despite new competition from folks like Google's Android, the company is not losing traction with developers."

And, as MediaMemo notes, "The velocity of apps Apple is delivering is increasing." It took Apple just over a year to serve up the first 1.5 billion apps, which it calculates averages out at 4.1 million downloads per day. But it moved the next 500 million apps within 76 days. That's a 6.6 million per day average.

The Times' Bits blog credits "the breadth and depth of Apple's app store" for continuing to maintain its lead against up-and-comers like the Palm Pre and the phones running Google's Android operating system.

Yet, one more big question remains: "How many of those apps are still being used after they're downloaded?"

Read the whole story at New York Times et al. »