By AppleInsider Staff

Published: 08:55 AM EST

Apple Wednesday announced that more than 100,000 applications are now available on its App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, crossing the milestone less than a year and a half after its debut.

"The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating."

The App Store serves customers in 77 countries with apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. In September, Apple announced that App Store users have downloaded over two billion apps, continuing to make it the world’s most popular applications store.

"The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve," said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. "With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers."

In September, Apple debuted the Genius recommendation feature to help users sort through the plethora of options on the App Store. iTunes 9 has also allowed users to sort and manage their iPhone and iPod touch applications more easily. This summer, the hardware maker also added keywords to software to allow for easier search.

Apple noted Wednesday that it continues to improve search and discovery with new features including App Store Essentials selections, sub category listings and more valuable customer reviews. It said developers have been pleased with the results.

"With 10,000 downloads a day, worldwide customer response to our I Am T-Pain App has exceeded our wildest expectations," said Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule. "The App Store has given us a unique opportunity to create and grow a very successful business, and we’re looking forward to an exciting future."



This summer, iPhone OS 3.0 was released, bringing over 100 new features to the iPhone and iPod touch, including Cut, Copy and Paste; MMS; landscape view for Mail, Text and Notes; stereo Bluetooth; shake to shuffle; parental controls; automatic login at Wi-Fi hot spots and Push Notifications. Apple said the new features have been popular with customers, with more than two billion Push Notifications sent to apps available from the App Store.

The company also noted that the recently introduced In App Purchase feature extended to free applications means leading developers will now be able to offer customers the choice of buying content, subscriptions and digital services from directly inside their apps.