25,000 iPhone Apps on the App Store Milestone Almost Crossed

The milestone of 25,000 iPhone apps on Apple's App Store was crossed sometime overnight Thursday as per 148Apps.com.

After seeing these numbers, it is not surprising to see competitors such as RIM, Palm announcing their own versions of the App Store.

You can checkout some interesting details about the iPhone apps that are currently available on the App Store.

The number of iPhone apps has crossed the 25,000 mark as per 148Apps.com but since Apple has removed, rejected or banned iPhone apps from the App Store for reasons such as copyright issues, duplicating functionality, offering tethering functionality, based on limited utility, content or materials found objectionable, just a ridiculous app etc, the active iPhone apps is just above 24,000 (and counting) as per AppShopper.

The milestone reveals some interesting details:

• If you purchase all the iPhone apps from the App Store, it would cost you $72,471.81.
• The most popular price for an iPhone app is $0.99. There are 10,464 iPhone apps available at that price range. If you had thought it would be free apps then it is a distant second with 6,170 iPhone apps available for free.
• The average cost of an iPhone app is $2.79 including free apps which indicates that the average cost is slowing coming down. The average cost was $3.12 when the App Store had crossed the 10,000 mark.
• The number of the iPhone apps that are being added every month to the App Store is increasing steadily. 3,808 iPhone apps were added in Dec 2008, 4,843 added in Jan 2009 and a massive 5,549 iPhone apps in Feb 2009.
• iPhone games is the most popular category of iPhone apps with 5,343 and Weather is the least popular category with 117 iPhone apps.
• If you consider the discrepancy between 148Apps and AppShopper (which tracks active iPhone Apps on the App Store), it looks like over 1000 iPhone apps were removed, rejected or banned from the App Store by Apple.

The numbers are slightly inflated due to free and paid versions of an iPhone app since developers currently cannot offer demo versions of their iPhone app which would have allowed users to try the apps before buying them.

But even then, (almost) crossing the 25,000 iPhone apps milestone is very impressive especially when you consider that Apple launched the App Store only 8 months back.

To see some of our favorite iPhone apps checkout the iPhone Apps review section. Please also tell us your favorite iPhone app or apps in the comments below.