2009-04-02

600.000 iPhone Skype apps!

Robert Miller, Skype’s General Counsel wrote yesterday: “An interesting fact: at the time of writing, 24 hours after launch, more than 600,000 downloads of the software had taken place on the App Store”.
This is about 420 downloads of the Skype iPhone application per minute! I suppose quite a lot of these people didn’t know Skype before, and are also downloading the Skype client on their Macintosh or PC. By viral collateral growth (the publicity, etc.) there will also be a growth of “non-iPhone” users.

Apple has sold more than 17 million iPhones since it launched it’s “hyped” machine.
This means that in one day, 3.5% of the iPhone owners downloaded the application. This is impressive! Of course, Skype is free! And i would not be surprised that within a few days much more than 10% of the iPhone users will have downloaded the Skype application.

Well, well, as I said several times in the past months: exciting moments for Skype! Even the fact that Deutsche Telecom told it will block Skype (unless it was indeed an April’s Fool Joke) is in fact fantastic publicity for Skype. If it isn’t a joke, well then Deutsche Telecom is itself a very “fossil” non-joke: as all former State Monopolists they are accelerating their own death by such measures. People will be aware there is something threatening for Deutsche Telecom, and will try to find out how to circumvent the blocking!

[EDITED ON April 3] Not worth another post, but one million downloads in less than 2 days

4 comments:

Vincent said...

Actually Apple has sold 17 M iPhones AND 13 M iPod Touch (I think they announced it recently), and Skype is also available on the iPod Touch.

Jean Mercier said...

You are completely right of course. However, i think only a smaller part of the Skype applications are downloaded on the iPod Touch, because people who buy it have a completely other objective (music, video, surfing) concerning what they need.

But, again, you are right!

Vincent said...

Good point.

On the other hand, the value of Skype on the iPod Touch is maybe even bigger as on the iPhone, as Skype gives a fully new feature - calling - to it.

Jean Mercier said...

Here i agree also! :-)