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Apple nearing 1 billion apps served

Company plans to give away a $10,000 iTunes gift certificate along with some Apple gear to the person lucky enough to download the 1 billionth iPhone or iPod Touch application.

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
Tom Krazit
Almost $13,000 in Apple gear awaits the person lucky enough to download the 1 billionth App Store app. Apple

Apple is approaching the 1 billion mark for applications downloaded from the App Store, and plans to give out a host of Apple gear to the lucky billionth customer.

The company put up a countdown Web page Friday as it gets closer to the mark: as of this writing, about 928 million applications have been downloaded from the App Store since it went live last July, according to the counter. Whoever manages to download the 1 billionth application will come away with a pretty good haul: a MacBook Pro, a 32GB iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a $10,000 iTunes gift certificate.

Somewhere north of 30,000 applications have made their way onto the App Store to fuel those 1 billion downloads. Along with the promotion, Apple released some stats on the top downloads in both the paid and free categories: Facebook has been downloaded the most times among the free applications, while Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D has received the most downloads among paid applications.