By Daniel Eran Dilger

Published: 04:00 PM EST (01:00 PM PST)

Apple's new Mac App Store has more than doubled the new users signing up with Evernote's cloud-based note capturing service when it opened two days ago, while Apple itself is also benefitting handsomely from setting up an App Store for Mac users.

Evernote sees dramatic account boost from Mac App Store

A day after the new store opened, Evernote reported that 90,000 Mac users downloaded the new app on its first day, about 40,000 of which were users new to the service.

Evernote allows users to upload photos, notes, URLs, pasteboard clippings and documents to their personal (free or paid) online storage account, and then search this content later, using sophisticated tools that, among other things, perform optical character recognition to find text within photographs uploaded to the service.

The product has been around for years, but growth began to mushroom when the company released a client app for the iPhone through the iOS App Store. Last year, Evernote reported 223 percent growth from iPhone users, who now number 1.1 million users.

Android and BlackBerry users grew even faster in 2010, but BlackBerry still only amounts to a few thousand users, while the Android userbase remains less than half that of iOS users. Other mobile platforms, including HP's Palm/webOS and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, actually lost users.

Evernote also offers both web-based and standalone desktop client apps for Mac and Windows users, and a Chrome Extension. Discovering these options, as well as downloading and installing them, is harder to do without a high profile app store, but the company's Windows and Desktop Web client users both grew by more than 200 percent in 2010.

Mac users only grew by 150 percent last year, but the opening of the Mac App Store appears set to change that. More than half of all the new users Evernote was signing up on opening day were new Mac users, who represent only half of those who downloaded the client app from the new Mac App Store.



Apple its own App Store success story

The Mac App Store has been enthusiastically embraced by other small Mac and iOS developers, as well as, of course, by Apple itself, which has eight apps listed: three iWork apps, three iLife apps (notably excluding iWeb and iDVD), as well as Aperture 3 (priced at $79.99, rather than $199 retail) and Apple Remote Desktop (also $79.99, rather than its list price of $279.95).

Apple's apps currently take five of the top twelve paid app slots, and all eight apps the company has listed are listed among its dozen "top grossing" apps, making the company its own most successful Mac App Store software developer.

Neither Adobe nor Google nor Microsoft nor Mozilla have listed any apps on the new Mac App Store, although all four have created original titles for the iOS App Store. This may allow Apple to offer a more credible challenge to Adobe's Lightroom with its own Aperture, and to further expand the installed base of iWork users at the expense of Microsoft's Office.

Apple also has a variety of other apps it has not added to the Mac App Store, including multiple versions of Final Cut and Logic, its studio-suite bundled Pro Apps such as Motion and Color, as well as the apps it currently bundles with Mac OS X, ranging from iTunes to Preview to Mail to Safari to Front Row. Some of these apps install background processes that are not allowed under Apple's terms for third party Mac App Store titles, however.

With a functional Mac software market that is easy to discover and use, Apple may seek to expand the number of formerly bundled apps it maintains and updates as standalone titles, much as Microsoft did when it stripped a variety of productivity apps from Windows Vista (including Windows Mail and Calendar) and made them a separate download.