Steve Jobs has been chatting to the Wall Street Journal about the iPhone, its App Store and the ‘Kill Switch.’
Jobs confirmed that an impressive 60 million iPhone applications have been downloaded in the first month of the iPhone App Store.
Made up of a mixture of free (the majority of them) and pay-for apps, an average of $1m was spent there a day, bringing in $30m.
Of that $30m, $21 million went to the application developers, with the lucky top ten of them sharing earnings of roughly $9 million between them.
Never one to miss the chance to court headlines, Jobs is reported as saying that, “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”
Kill Switch
Jobs confirmed that the iPhone Kill Switch, that caused so many keystrokes to be made during speculation of its existence, was true.
Jobs argued that the ability to rid iPhones of rogue applications, discovered by Jonathan Zdziarski, could be needed in the case of an application snooping on iPhone owners’ personal data.
Jobs quote, “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.”
It’s not clear if this will appeases those who feel that Apple’s ability to remotely control applications on their handsets infringes their privacy.