It’s been a month since the iPhone 3G and the App Store made their debut, and Steve Jobs used the occasion to offer up some selected facts and figures:

• Users have now downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone and iPod touch, or roughly 2 million per day.
• Revenue from those applications came to about $30 million. 70% went to the developers; Apple kept 30%. (Free apps apparently accounted for the vast majority of the downloads, since average revenue per download is 50 cents.)
• If sales continue at the current pace, Apple stands to clear at least $360 million a year. “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time…. I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software.”
• Of the $21 million that developers cleared in the first month, roughly $9 million went to the creators of the top 10 best sellers. Sega Corp., for example, says it sold more than 300,000 copies of its $9.99 Super Monkeyball game in 20 days.
• Jobs believes a rich array of applications is what will distinguish the iPhone from competing cell phones. “Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that,” he told the Journal. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.”

Apple had earlier reported that 10 million apps were downloaded in the first three days after launch. By July 21, that number had reached 25 million (see here). The latest number suggests that downloads have accelerated in the last 10 days, from July 21st’s 1.25 apps per day to the current 2 apps per day.

Relations between Apple (AAPL) and its developers have not been smooth, however (see Trouble in the App Store). Jobs commented on one of the hot-button issues: He confirmed that the iPhone operating system contains a kill switch that gives Apple the capability to reach into an iPhone (presumably during a sync operation) and remove a malicious application.

“Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he said.

Separately, an Apple spokeswoman defended the decision to pull a program called I Am Rich, which cost $999.99 and did nothing but display the image of a ruby on the iPhone’s screen, off the App Store shelves. She characterized it as a “judgment call.”

Jobs did not use the occasion of the iPhone 3G’s one-month anniversary to report how many of the devices Apple has sold. He may be saving that number for another day — and another round of headlines.

[Fortune's Scott Moritz reported Monday that at least one analyst puts iPhone sales for the first month at 3 million units. See here.]

UPDATE: Gigaom’s Om Malik, who says he has downloaded three dozen apps but only likes four of them, adds some interesting data about how many of those 60 million apps are in active use. He cites research by New York-based Pinch Media, which reports that free downloads to paid downloads is about 10 to 1. Moreover:

“According to data collected by Pinch Media, on average, less than 20% of an application’s overall unique users return to an application each day. [CEO Greg] Yardley also pointed out that people are using the apps for just under five minutes at a time, on average. The majority only use the applications once per day - average number of uses per day is around 1.2.” (link)

It’s been a confusing week for both sellers and buyers at the App Store — the venue for third party software that is the best thing to happen to the iPhone (except maybe the price cuts) since it arrived more than a year ago.

The iPhone 3G is OK, if you manage battery consumption very carefully. And Mobile Me is slowly getting up to speed (see here). But the App Store — with 1,574 programs as of Saturday morning, from Abacus to Zxilophone — is a runaway hit, a software candy store that offers iPhone and iPod touch owners a fresh tray of tasty treats nearly every day.

So what are we to make of the fact that Apple (AAPL), without explanation, has started pulling programs from the store, leaving both the people who wrote them and the customers who bought them scratching their heads and wondering who’s in charge? At least five apps have disappeared so far, but three dominated the tech news this week:

• BoxOffice: This free application, which listed movie times, locations and links to reviews, was one of the first programs available when the App Store opened on July 11 and offered worthy competition to Movies.app, a must-have program from the early days of the original iPhone. BoxOffice disappeared from the App Store on July 31. “Apple pulled the app yesterday without giving my (sic) any notification that they were doing it, or what their justification was for removing it,” its developer, Metasyntactic, wrote the next day on a MacRumor forum. “I’ve tried to contact them about the issue, but it’s been a complete dead end. If anyone has a useful contact number for apple, please let me know.”
• I Am Rich: This one is a little easier to understand. The priciest app in the store — it sold for $999.99 — was also the most useless: it did nothing but take your money and display a red gem on your screen. “The red icon on your iPhone or iPod touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were rich enough to afford this,” the information page on iTunes warned. “It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all.” Apple, which was collecting $300 for every copy that sold (and at least eight did, developer Armin Heinrich told Silicon Alley News), may well have received complaints and felt obliged to protect unwitting customers. But what kind of screening process approved I Am Rich in the first place?
• Nullriver: This may be the most bewildering case of all. The application allowed Mac owners to use their iPhone as a wireless modem to reach the Internet over AT&T’s (T) cellular networks — either 3G or EDGE, whichever was available. It was removed from the store on August 1, briefly reinstated, and then pulled for good. According to Nullriver CEO Adam Dan, technicians at Apple told him it was pulled the first time by mistake. “They want to get NetShare back up, but they want to do some technical analysis that they couldn’t explain to us,” Dan told Wired.com. As iPhone Savior pointed out at the time, AT&T’s user agreement clearly forbids unauthorized tethering (see here), but it’s not clear why AT&T would object to the extra revenue stream. “Apple runs the app store, so you’ll have to ask them about the availability of this and other apps,” an AT&T spokesperson pointedly told Gizmodo. “For customers looking for a smartphone with tethering capabilities, AT&T has a number of other options to choose from.” Perhaps it was Apple that had a problem with Nullriver. They may have their own tethering plan in the works, and Nullriver might well have offended someone in Cupertino’s sense of how easy-to-use an iPhone app ought to be (tethering is never easy, and the instructions included in Nullriver were hopelessly inadequate.)

Apple has not responded to requests for comment, so nobody really knows for sure what’s going on. But it sounds like they were overwhelmed by the initial flood of applications and may be trying, by fits and starts, to develop a rational policy.

“From what I can tell their approval process is not very strict at all,” Nullriver’s Dan told Wired.com. “I think they run it, start it up and if it doesn’t crash they approve it. They brainlessly click through, and if there’s problems they remove it.” (link)

Even more troubling, for some observers, is the discovery of what seemed to be a blacklist mechanism buried in iPhone OS 2.0 and unearthed last week by Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics. It consists of an URL that points to a page of unauthorized programs.

“This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what applications it should turn off,” writes Zdziarski. “At the moment, no apps have been blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so chooses to shut them down.”

For an extensive discussion of the significance of this list, see Techmeme here.

The number of offerings on the App Store — the venue for independently produced programs that helps distinguish Apple’s smartphone from all others — hit 1,001 on Monday night.

That’s roughly double the number that were available when the store opened just over two weeks ago (on July 11, the same day the iPhone 3G went on sale), and includes popular games like Texas Hold’em and Crash Bandicoot, business tools like Bloomberg News and Salesforce Mobile, and social networking programs like Facebook, MySpace and AIM. Roughly 20% of the apps are free; 90% cost $10 or less. Most also work on the iPod touch.

Many consider this flood of software to be a bigger deal than the phone itself. Among smartphones, only the RIM (RIMM) Blackberry has created a comparable platform for so-called third-party programs (see its application store here), but because the Blackberry lacks a touch screen and accelerometer, its apps don’t compare with the iPhone’s in terms of features and ease of use. [Several readers note that Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Mobile and the Palm (PALM) OS also provide rich software platforms. You can view their offerings here and here, respectively.]

How you feel about Apple’s App Store seems to depend on what side of the virtual counter you stand.

MG Siegler, speaking for many App Store customers, declared it “simply sublime” in his Venture Beat column and described it as a new paradigm that would transform Apple as a company. “With each passing day I’m finding myself becoming addicted to it in the same way I was once addicted to the iTunes music store.” (link)

On the developer side, however, tempers are becoming increasingly frayed. The programmers who raced to create applications — hoping to be the first in their particular category — complain that Apple isn’t approving their submissions fast enough and that when their apps do get OK’d, they’re not getting promoted on the store’s New, What’s Hot or Staff Favorites sections or updated quickly enough. New versions sit in the queue at Apple for up to a week, leaving users to wrestle with bugs that have already been fixed. “If an update does make it into the store,” writes David Chartier in an Ars Technica article that summarizes the litany of developer complaints, “iTunes isn’t always listing the correct version. NetNewsWire, for example, is actually at version 1.0.7, but the App Store says only 1.0.1.”

But the programmers’ biggest gripe is the gag order imposed by Apple’s so-called NDA (nondisclosure agreement), which prevents developers from talking to the press, to the public and even among themselves about their programs and the SDK (software developers kit) they use to write them.

This can have real repercussions. Erica Sadun, author of “The iPhone Developers Cookbook,” (Addison-Wesley), has had to delay publication rather than risk running afoul of Apple’s legal team.  “[My publisher has] advance orders,” she told Ars Technica, “they have commitments.”

A “very polite petition” asking Apple to lift the NDA had drawn a couple hundred signatures as of Monday night. By then, a Web site called “[expletive deleted] NDA,” which keeps track of every time that phrase is uttered on Twitter, had collected 15,000 hits.

On Sunday, July 13, Apple (AAPL) issued a press release announcing that 10 million apps had been downloaded from the App Store in its first three days; by July 21, that number had risen to 25 million.

“The App Store is a grand slam,” said Steve Jobs. “Developers have created some extraordinary applications, and the App Store can wirelessly deliver them to every iPhone and iPod touch user instantly.”

Apple has not yet marked the 1,000 application milestone — or responded publicly to the developer complaints.

After suffering severe product shortages — and frustrating untold numbers of would-be buyers — Apple by fits and starts seems to be getting its iPhone 3G supplies in order.

Thanks to a pair of free tools that have emerged to take advantage of Apple’s raw data feed of store-by-store availability, we’re getting a much better picture of the company’s supply and distribution problems than is afforded by the availability widget on Apple’s website.

The first is Chris Barnes’s real-time iPhone 3G Store Availability tool, which dips into the data feed every 15 minutes and displays all the information on one page — rather than breaking it up into state-by-state reports as Apple does. That way you can see at a glance that, as of Thursday 6:30 a.m. EDT, for example, the 16GB White iPhone 3G was in stock in 97 of 188 Apple stores in the United States, or 52% of all company shops.

[UPDATE: Apple seems to be having trouble with its data stream. As of Friday 7:00 a.m. EDT, its own widget showed no iPhones available anywhere in the United States. Barnes' TopMuffin site, using data updated at 3:53 a.m., reported that there are iPhones -- at least white ones -- in stock in most states.]

The second tool is a series of fever charts published by Sean Harding on his personal blog here. We’ve posted several examples below the fold. When the data are arrayed to show availability over time, some interesting patterns emerge. For one thing, you can clearly see where the iPhone supply nearly flatlined on July 20, when only three Apple stores in the United States had any in stock (see Comic relief: The world is out of iPhones!).

You can also see how supply varies during the day, as stores run out of units one by one, and then spikes in the morning as the stock is replenished. On Wednesday morning, for example, the percentage of Apple stores with iPhones in stock reached 80%, although by the end of the day it was down to just over 50%.

The charts also suggest that the black 8GB model is the most popular and the white 16GB the least — although that assumes that Apple (AAPL) is manufacturing the three varieties in roughly equal numbers.

Below the fold, as promised, Harding’s most recent charts.

Apple’s App Store is open for business, and there’s a lot to see.

I count nearly 27 pages of programs, with 21 applications per page, for a grand total of 551 apps designed for the iPhone or the iPod touch.

Browsing this rich library of diversions, the first thing that strikes you is how many of them are games.

In Apple’s taxonomy, 10 pages of apps — 210 programs in all — are categorized as “Entertainment.” Not all of these are games, however. There are a lot of books in there. Charles Dickens and Edgar Rice Burroughs are heavily represented, as are Austen, Bronte, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Defoe, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Kipling, Maugham, Swift, Verne, Wharton, Wolfe, and “Leo” (sic) Tolstoy. There’s even a copy of Descartes’ A Discourse on Reason. That’s Entertainment?

The Bible, we’re happy to report, is not classified as Entertainment, although we’re not sure Reference is quite the right place for it.

There are 18 categories of programs in all, from Business to Weather. None is as heavily populated as Games or Entertainment. There are two and a half pages of Productivity tools (from Abacus to ZIPcodes), a page and a half of Business programs, a little over a page of Finance tools, and nearly five pages of Utilities.

There’s only a page and a half of Social Networking programs, but they look pretty interesting — especially the ones like Whrrl that take advantage of GPS to show your current location and that of your friends.

Travel is dominated by language programs, Sports by fitness and Golf tools.

Apple (AAPL) also sorts programs by What’s New, What’s Hot and Staff Favorites. The latter features Critter Crunch, iZen Garden and Chimps Ahoy.

Have you got a favorite or spotted a dog? Let us know in the comment stream.

Four months after Steve Jobs first announced it, Apple’s App Store — the showcase for third-party developers writing new software for the iPhone and iPod touch — has opened its doors, at least for some users. (More on that below.)

The timing of the launch was apparently driven by New Zealand, where the iPhone 3G was set to go on sale at 12:01 a.m., Friday July 11. Given the time difference, that dictated an opening in the United States no later than 8:01 a.m. EDT on Thursday.

What will you find in the App Store? There are already 26 full pages of programs, with 21 applications on each, and according to Apple (AAPL) there’s a lot more to come.

In interviews with the New York Times and USA Today, Steve Jobs offered a few statistics:

• More than 500 programs
• 90% of them $9.99 or less
• 25% of them free
• One third of them games

In addition to games, the store is expected to offer lots of educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools.

Matt Murphy, a partner in the fund set up by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to invest $100 million in iPhone apps, told the Times that he expects games, health care, social networking, mobile commerce and location-based services to be the most popular types of software.

“An application that would allow Bay Area surfers to check tides and network with other surfers failed to past muster” with the fund, according to the Times. (link; log-in required)

Most applications written for the iPhone 3G are expected to run on the original iPhone and the iPod touch. The App Store is available as a free download for owners of the old iPhone and will cost $9.99 for iPod touch owners.

The store requires that users first download iTunes 7.7, which Apple’s Software Update describes as follows:

Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod touch with software version 2.0 or later. Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home — a free download from the App Store.

The iPhone 2.0 software update is required to actually run programs for sale on the store, so it’s only fully functional for owners of first-generation iPhones and iPod touches who have updated their devices or, presumably, New Zealanders who bought the first iPhone 3Gs.

But once your iTunes is up-to-date, you can browse the full array of 551 programs immediately available, arranged alphabetically from “A Christmas Carol” and “A Discourse on Reason” (there are a surprising number of books) to zintin and Zipcodes. Plus a handful of programs whose names start with numbers or are written in Chinese characters.

There’s a theory favored by savvy Apple watchers that the first generation iPhone — greeted with such hoopla last year — was not actually the real thing.

That iPhone – the one that hundreds of thousands of Americans queued up to buy for up to $599 apiece, the one that Time magazine named the Invention of the Year, the one that six million people purchased before Apple finally stopped making them in May – was just a trial balloon floated by Steve Jobs to test the airwaves.

According to this theory, the real iPhone – the one aimed at the broadest possible market here and abroad — would start at $199, the magic price point at which consumer electronics devices seem to take off and become mass market phenomena. It would have built-in GPS location tracking, “push” e-mail, and wireless syncing with corporate enterprise networks. Most important, it would run hundreds of third-party applications available through an online App Store and operate over so-called third generation (3G) cellular networks that are two to five times faster than the one used by that first, prototype iPhone.

If this theory is true, then the real iPhone era begins on Friday, July 11, at 8:00 a.m.

That’s when the iPhone 3G goes on sale at Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) outlets in the United States and at the stores of Apple’s cellular partners in some 20 other countries around the world. (Strictly speaking, the era begins early Thursday, when the device goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. New Zealand time. Given how the Earth turns, that corresponds to 8:00 a.m. July 10 at Apple’s New York City flagship store and 5:01 a.m. at its Cupertino headquarters.)

Some things about the new iPhone haven’t changed. Physically, it’s almost identical to the first. Same touch screen, same dimensions — except for the back, which is slightly bulgier and made of black plastic instead of metal.

Conceptually, it’s still one device that combines three of today’s most popular technologies — cellular communications, portable digital music and wireless access to e-mail and the World Wide Web.

And the fundamental breakthrough is the same: unlike most devices that combine several functions and do none of them well, the iPhone puts together three must-have functions and does at least two of them better than they have ever been done before.

Early reviews suggest that the one thing the first iPhone was not particularly good at — telephony — is much improved in the second version, thanks to a redesigned audio system and, perhaps, improvements in AT&T’s network.

There’s still no physical keyboard, so devotees of RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry who were turned off by the lack of tactile feedback when dialing or texting on the first iPhone are not likely to be turned on by the second. The battery is still not user-replaceable, a shortcoming that may be even more important this time given the power demands of operating at 3G speeds. (One early reviewer who was getting nine hours of Internet use on the first iPhone clocked less than six hours on the second. See here.)

The built-in camera is the same under-2 megapixel device that can’t do video. There’s still no way to cut and paste text. And you are still married to AT&T’s cellular network for the life of a two-year contract, at least in the United States. In fact, the bonds of that matrimony may be even stronger this time around, given the way AT&T has set up the in-store activation procedure, and will cost U.S. customers at least $10 a month more.

There are many small improvements. You can search address books, delete e-mails en masse, set parental controls and save e-mailed photos. (These improvements will also be available to owners of the original iPhone as part of a free software upgrade.)

Investors will note that Apple has made major changes in its business model. Rather than testing the waters with a handful of exclusive contracts — first with AT&T, then with O2 (TEF) in England, T-Mobile (DT) in Germany and Orange (FTE) in France — Apple has gone global this time, with deals in six of the seven continents and more than 70 countries. To do this, however, it has had to largely abandon the arrangement — unique among cell phone manufacturers — by which carriers sold the iPhone for full price and kicked back a share of their monthly revenue to Apple, which was accounted for in monthly increments over the life of a cell phone contract (usually 24 months).

Steve Jobs was able to dictate these terms — quite advantageous to Apple — because the carriers recognized that being first to sell the iPhone would win them thousands of new customers. In most of the new markets Apple is entering this year, it is acting more like a conventional cellphone manufacturer, taking its (sizeable) profits upfront and letting the carriers subsidize the device with voice and data plans as costly as local market conditions will allow. (See Canada’s Rogers Communications (RCI), here for example, to see what kinds of problems this can lead to.) The price of the iPhone itself also varies widely, from as much as $888 for pre-paid phones in Italy to $75 in Mexico and free with certain data plans in the U.K.

Except for those costs, none of this affects the experience of the users.

For them, what will really distinguish this iPhone from the one that preceded it — and from every other smartphone out there — is the flood of software expected to be unleashed when the App Store opens on Friday. Apple has already demonstrated more than a dozen third-party programs for the iPhone, and over the next few months you can expect to hear about hundreds more: business apps that take advantage of the iPhones ability to “push” data down the network when it’s available (rather than when it’s requested); games that use the device’s accelerometer to navigate virtual space; shopping and social networking programs that use satellite tracking to tell you what shops or restaurants and which of your friends (or enemies) are near the spot where you are, right now.

In the end, every successful computing device is ultimately a software “platform,” a vehicle for the programs that give it its true value. This is where the real iPhone will stand out, and judging from the interest among the 4,000 third-party developers who have already signed up to write for it, it’s got a good headstart.

The great scramble among software developers to write the first iPhone killer app is coming to a head.

The race began in earnest in March when Steve Jobs unfolded Apple’s “iPhone software roadmap,” a two-part package comprised of a tool kit to help developers write programs for the iPhone and a venue in which to sell them — a variation on Apple’s iTunes music store model called the App Store.

Although the iPhone 3G is set to go on sale in nine days — at 8 a.m. Friday  July 11 — Apple has still not announced when the software store will open. But on Wednesday it delivered a pretty broad hint: a July 7 deadline for developers to submit their finished apps for the store’s grand opening.

“Have your application be among the first available when the App Store goes live,” the notice read. “We will continue to accept applications after this time, however your application may not be available until after the launch of the App Store.”

The message was not lost on developers. From Oracle to VisiCalc, the winning application on any software platform tends to be the one that gets there first — although as VisiCalc proved when it was overtaken first by Lotus 1-2-3 and then by Microsoft Excel, any app can be displaced when a new platform comes along.

According to Apple (AAPL), 25,000 people applied to be part of its iPhone developers program, of which 4,000 were admitted. These include some of the biggest names in software publishing — Sega and Electronic Arts (ERTS), for example — and representatives from approximately 175 Fortune 500 companies, as well as hundreds of one-man shops. But even the biggest boys can use the free publicity that will attend prominent positioning on the App Store shelves on opening day.

With so many apps to choose among, picking winners will not be easy. Apple has the best perspective; it showcased 16 apps at the March SDK event and the June Worldwide Developers Conference (see the keynote here), and by next week it will have seen and signed off on hundreds more.

Meanwhile, pitches from publishers inviting software reviews have started to pour in over the transom. Businessweek last Friday posted a slide show featuring a dozen programs under development (see here). Other journalists have used their blogs to troll for promising apps. The coyest was posted by The New York Times’ David Pogue, author of “iPhone - The Missing Manual,” who may or may not already have an iPhone 3G in hand for review (if he did, he couldn’t say). On Tuesday, he bemoaned the fact that even “Big Chief Newspaper Reviewers” didn’t know what apps were coming down the pike and invited developers to give him sneak peaks (see here). He may have regretted opening the floodgates. By 1:35 that afternoon, his post had been updated and the invitation withdrawn.

UPDATE: The latest version of iPhone OS 2.0 includes a nonfunctioning App Store button on the home screen, according to reviews of a confidential pre-release copy. “Rock-solid,” pronounces Gizmodo’s Jesusdiaz; it “rocks!” says Spark Capital’s bijan sabet.

“We don’t intend to make any money off the App Store,” said Steve Jobs back in March. “We’re basically giving all the money to the developers and the 30 percent that pays for running the store, that’ll be great.” (link)

But like the iTunes Store, which Apple (AAPL) claims to run at “just above break even,” but which probably generated $200 million to $500 million in profit for Apple last year (see here and here), the App Store could prove to be a nice little cash cow for Apple over time.

How nice? Ask two different analysts and you’ll get two different answers.

In a report to clients on Tuesday, Bernstein Research’s Toni Sacconaghi ran the numbers and concluded: “We don’t see revenues from the new Apps (sic) Store as meaningfully impacting Apple’s economic model.”

If the average iPhone owner buys two programs at $5 each (a generous assumption, he says, given that 50% of iPod users have never bought anything from the iTunes Store), Sacconaghi estimates that the App Store will generate at most $150 million in revenue from applications by the end of 2009 (vs. several billion from the iPhone overall).

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, by contrast, ran the same assumptions through his model and got a very different answer: total App Store revenue of $780 million in 2009, of which Apple’s cut is 30%, or $234 million.

Why the difference? It stems primarily from the two analysts’ projections of iPhone sales, which lie on opposite ends of the Apple analyst spectrum.

Sacconaghi is on the low end. He believes that by end of 2009, the iPhone user base will be about 25 million worldwide.

Munster occupies the high end. In his note to clients Tuesday he estimated the iPhone installed base combining the iPhone and iPod touch at the end of 2009 will be 78 million users.

[Update: Munster took a closer look at the App Store on Wednesday. Based on the health of the iPhone developer community (evidenced by the sell-out crowd of 5,200 at 2008 WWDC and his own informal survey of 20 programmers there) he reiterates his contention that the App Store could make a "material contribution" to Apple's upside.

"Based on our scenario analysis, we believe the App Store could be a $1billion+ market (aggressive case), and add 1%-3% to operating income in CY09."

He lays out his three scenarios (conservative, neutral, aggressive) in the following chart:

Part of Munster's enthusiasm for the App Store stems from the applications demoed at WWDC. "Mobile users haven't seen apps like this before," he writes. Sacconaghi thinks the assumption that users will buy two apps each is "generous." Munster thinks it's conservative, given that 70% of the apps he discussed with developers are unique to the iPhone, and will not be available on other platforms.

See AppleInsider for more detail.]