ON APPLE'S App Store is a sign: over 945 million apps downloaded. By the end of the next few weeks, 1 billion apps will have been downloaded.
Apple's success with the App Store is the envy of the entire cellphone industry.
For years, smartphone pioneers like Palm and RIM (Research In Motion) - who makes the Blackberry cellphones, famous for pushing e-mail messages to users - have been trying to get its users to download third-party applications.
I do know of a couple of developers as far back as seven or eight years ago who were building such applications. But they were doing it out of passion and they didn't have a way of marketing their software to global customers.
Apple's App Store has changed all this.
By creating a tightly integrated system between the online App Store and the iPhone and the iPod Touch, Apple has successfully convinced users to get these third-party applications for which they may pay as little as US99 cents.
Now the entire cellphone industry is in a tizzy as they try to emulate Apple's way of doing things.
Competitors and application developers are already complaining that Apple's system is proprietary and that it can't be used on other systems.
Who cares, when it can get 1 billion downloads of applications in a mere nine months? With 30 million iPhones and iPod Touches that have been sold so far, it works out to about 31 apps per unit.
So why have the other cellphone makers who also have third-party applications failed to have similar success?
Apple's secret is in the user experience that it has created. It has made it not only easy to browse, search and download applications, but also makes it really fun to do so too.
I've downloaded 10 apps onto my iPhone so far. Some, like restaurant reviewer buUuk, are free. So is Al Jazeera news. Others like iFitness, Sudoku and Tetris cost more than US$5.
I expect I'll be buying more in the next few months. I've bought many of them for my iPhone on a whim while waiting for a friend. It's painless and all it takes is less than a minute before the app is on your phone.
It's this easy user experience and the element of fun that Apple's competitors have to copy before they'll be as successful.