Jobs: iPhone Software Booming

What a month for Apple Inc.'s App Store.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said users downloaded 60 million programs from the newly launched online software clearinghouse, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

About half of the downloaded programs were free, but Apple sold an average of $1 million per day in applications nonetheless, for a total of $30 million in sales during the stores opening month.

Jobs said he expects Apple to sell about $360 million a year at App Store if current revenue streams continue at a similar pace.

"This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," Jobs told the Journal. "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."

"I've never seen anything like this in my career for software," Jobs added.

Apple keeps 30 percent of proceeds from the application sales, Jobs explained, while the software creators receive 70 percent. While Jobs doesn't expect Apple to make huge profits from Apps Store, he expects Apps Store will result in the sale of more iPhones and iPod touch devices.

Applications, added Jobs, are what differentiate Apple from competing cell phone companies in the years ahead.

"Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that," Jobs told the Journal. "We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software."

Monkeyball, a video game made by Sega Corp., was a best seller during App Store's opening month, selling 300,000 copies at $9.99 per copy. And Epocrates, maker of a free drug encyclopedia, also did well, as users downloaded 125,000 copies.

Some software developers, however, were not so happy.

Apple removed one application from its store, I Am Rich, which caused some developers to question Apple's capability to remove undesirable software.

Jobs defended the move as necessary to protect App Store from potentially malicious programs.

"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever," Jobs told the Journal, "but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull."