Earlier this morning Apple announced that there had been 100 million downloads from the Mac App Store in under a year. Now, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple has pointed out a very interesting point, those downloads are unique, meaning that Apple is likely the biggest software distributor in the United States.
Perhaps the biggest boost to those sales numbers, however, comes from the fact that the download numbers do not include OS X Lion, Apple’s latest version of its operating system. Apple confirmed that they were unique downloads and that they also did not included downloads of purchased software to other Macs.
Dalrymple quotes numbers from NPD, that sales of boxed software in the US hit 50 million copies in the last year. Apple generally sells most of its software in the US, making it safe to conclude that it holds the top slot there. This is helped along by the fact that the Mac App Store is not yet available in most countries.
This means that the Mac App Store might very well hold up better against the iOS App Store, which hit 100M downloads in just three months.
Including numbers from the downloads of OS X Lion and downloads of those apps to other devices, something that the iOS App Store does include, could very well show better comparable traction.
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Of course, the Mac App Store still trails App Store downloads significantly, with the older store bringing in 1B downloads a month.
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