On July 10, 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told USA Today that the App Store contained 500 third-party applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, 125 of which were free downloads. These third party applications range from business to game applications, entertainment to educational applications, and many more applications available for free or for sale. On July 11, 2008 the store opened, allowing users to buy applications and transfer them to an iPhone or iPod Touch with the iPhone 2.0 software update, which became available through iTunes on the same day. Ten million applications were downloaded the first weekend.[14]
On January 16, 2009, Apple announced on its website that 500 million applications had been downloaded.[15] The billionth application was downloaded on April 23, 2009.[16]
Unlike the apps that come standard on the iPhone (such as the YouTube app, which Apple added through an iPhone OS software upgrade months before the launch of the App Store), apps downloaded from the App Store can be removed by the user at a future date.