The App Store is a software marketplace for Applications for the iPod, iPhone and soon the iPad. It opened its doors on the July 11, 2008 with 500 possible apps to download. At the beginning Apple did not expect the store to generate much profit, but as they recognized soon, they highly miscalculated. So already one month later, in August 2008, the store generated one million per day, what's a nice profit. Three days after the launch, already 10 million downloads were made. Until today the numbers have risen up to 140.000 available Apps and over 3 billion downloads.
Above all Apple does not write the software them self, but let it do by thousands of programmers which want to jump on the Apple train. So they get 70% of the selling price, while Apple itself keeps 30% of it. So they opened a really huge marketplace for coders. According to Apple, there are more then 125.000 active developers (09/2009).
The variety of Applications is very huge, so you can get business, entertainment, gaming or information Apps. There are also many local addressed Apps. For example there is a programmer who developed an application for vineyards at the Mosel region in Germany. Also some curios software was submitted to the App Store. For example a program called I am Rich. It was priced at $999,99 and had no other function than to show other people how rich the buyer was. But as Apple reviews all submitted Apps it was deleted from the store after one day and it also led Apple to place a cap on the Apps prices. But the developer of I am Rich already sold 8 exemplars of it in that one day, so he made a nice $8000.

The bad thing is, that the App Store is the only place where you can buy software for your iPhone or iPod. Other software won't work unless you jailbreak your phone, which makes you lose your guaranty. Apple says that they shield their customers with this restriction from malware. So Apple has the possibility to decide what software they approve to their store, and which not. Their criteria for approval isn't pretty transparent, so they receive harsh critics for their restrictional politics from the developers scene. Apple is accused to deny software which would do harm to their business. This puts brakes on the developers freedom. For example they removed some already listed and hyped Google applications, under the name Google Voice, because they were frightened of revenue losses.
As mentioned before, the only possibility to avoid this "dictatorship", is to jailbreak your iPod or iPhone. A private study affirms that about 9% of all iPhones are jailbreaked, tendency increasing.

Maybe this is even what Apple wants. They own the approved software while the more complicated software which could cause problems for the iPhone does still exist and attract customers but not under the responsibility of Apple. And it also gives the Brand "Apple" even more exclusiveness.

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