Apple is celebrating a new milestone for its iPad App Store this week. There are now more than 100,000 apps available in the tablet’s official App Store – not bad considering the device just went public last year.
During the summer of 2010, only 11,000 native apps occupied the store. Just four months ago when Apple raised the curtain on the iPad 2, there were all but 65,000 applications in the store. And one month ago, Apple boasted of 90,000 iPad apps at the start of the company’s annual WWDC.
According to MacStories, it took Apple 452 days to breach the 100,000 iPad app mark (as of Thursday) to arrive at just under 100,200 dedicated iPad apps.
While the iPad is primarily used for multimedia consumption and a whole lot of video gaming and app enjoyment, iPad owners are clearly using their tablets for web browsing purposes more than most industry analysts realize.
On Friday, Net Applications’ monthly figures showed that the iPad has profoundly impacted the way in which people around the world engage the Internet. According to the data, the iPad alone is now the source of a full 1% of of all global web broswing.
Although 1% doesn’t overtly appear to be a large piece of anything, Stephen Shankland of CNET reminds us that small percentages can and do sometimes conceal large numbers. “Fractions of a percent are small, but given how many millions of people use the Web, each tenth of a percent represents a vast number of people in absolute terms,” Shankland says.
