Mobile app frenzy – A second mobile store hits a billion downloads

Mobile App stores have been dominated by Apple and Android with Nokia’s Ovi a distant third, but there is an independent store out there which cuts across all except Apple. GetJar, which claims to be the the world’s second largest mobile app store, says it has just broken the 1 billion app download barrier. This is the only time a cross-platform apps store has clocked over 1 billion downloads and the second time after Apple did it a few months ago.

The message, of course, is that mobile apps, which have benefitted from the marketplace approach and the ability for developers to profit, are here to stay.

For the stat geek amongst you, it happened on June 7th at 11:02 AM and the app was, appropriately, a location-based app called Geodelic, an Android an app that discovers restaurants and retailers nearby to the handset.

Backed by Accel Partners and headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in the UK and Lithuania, GetJar has 60,000 apps which covers Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian, and has been going since 2004, hence the ‘get .jar file’ heritage of the name. GetJar has tripled its headcount in the last year and says it has quadrupled downloads per month recently.