Apple's App Store celebrates its fifth birthday on Wednesday, weeks after customers clocked up the 50 billionth download.
The store launched in 2008 selling games and tools for iPhones, but within two years the firm's iPad entered the market with new apps created to take advantage of the larger screen.
When it launched there were just 500 apps available but five years later there are now more than 900,000 for various devices, and 375,000 have been designed specifically for the iPad.
Apple claims to have paid software developers more than £6.7 billion in the past five years, which it says is three times more than the figure for all other mobile platforms combined.
Worldwide there are more than half a billion accounts registered with the App Store and there are in excess of 800 apps downloaded every second.
To celebrate the anniversary, the firm is giving away 10 popular apps - half of them games - to customers throughout this week.
The store reached the 50 billionth download on May 16. A measure of how quickly the market has expanded is that it took almost three years and eight months to hit 25 billion but just another 14 months to double that.
Latest charts released by Apple show that the most popular paid-for apps are Angry Birds for iPhone and Pages for iPad. The most downloaded free apps are Facebook for iPhone and Skype for iPad.
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