It took just 24 hours for Apple to rack up 1 million downloads from the Mac App Store, the company announced on Friday morning. The store opened on Thursday, with more than 1000 Mac applications available for download.
In a statement on the company’s site, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said: “We’re amazed at the incredible response the Mac App Store is getting. Developers have done a great job bringing apps to the store and users are loving how easy and fun the Mac App Store is.”
The Mac App Store’s progress on the download front is somewhat slower than that of its iOS sibling: when launched in 2008, the iOS App Store counted 10 million downloads in the first weekend. However, back in 2003, it took the iTunes Store a week to sell a million song—granted, it was a different world back then. And while Apple didn’t issue a press release when the iBookstore hit 1 million downloads, we do know that it hit 600,000 within the first week and 1.5 million within the first month.
In short, a million downloads in a day is nothing to sneeze at—especially from a platform that’s more than 25 years old. If the Mac App Store has only a fraction of the impact that the iOS App Store had, then Mac software development is probably still in for a substantial boost. But the real change is yet to come: when Macs start shipping with the Mac App Store preinstalled, look for the fireworks to start for real.