700,000 Palm Pre App Downloads

According to this chart, the Palm Pre has had close to 700,000 app downloads in the first two weeks of the phone's release. This is quite remarkable considering that there are only 30 app available for download at the release of the chart.

Apple had a total of 300 million downloads in the first 5 months from the App Store; however, they had about 10,000 apps to choose from. If you do the math 300,000,000 downloads / 10,000 apps / 5 months = about 6000 downloads of each app/month. Granted this is not an accurate number per app but just a figure to give a meter to compare the two stores. 700,000 downloads / 30 apps / .5 months = 46,666 downloads/app/month.

Granted my math doesn't take into account the change in number of apps from the start to time of measuring - obviously there weren't 10,000 apps at the beginning of the Apple App Store and the Palm Pre app store only had 18 to start with. This also doesn't take into consideration the fact that the 10,000 apps figure is bolstered by the fact that there are tons of useless apps that probably rarely get a download.

All in all, if developers get on the band wagon and start writing more apps for the Pre, I believe they will see a similar measure of success that Apple has seen. In the early days of the Palm III etc. there were tons of apps available for free or for pay. I have faith that this will be the case again for the Pre especially since it is a Linux based device which comes from a community of open source givers.