The Apple App Store has passed 1.5 billion downloads, Apple announced on July 14. "It’s going to be very hard for others to catch up," said Steve Jobs in a statement.

Apple has announced that, in just one year, customers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications from its App store. According to Apple, the App Store currently has more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a July 14 statement to mark the download milestone. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."

Apple reports that it has shipped over 40 million devices that run apps from the App Store, and these are used by tens of millions of people in 77 countries.

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