Apple claims $30 million in iPhone software sales

CEO Steve Jobs said that nearly 60 million applications have been downloaded, generating about $1 million in sales per day for the company.

Obviously with an average selling price of 50 cents -- and the minimum charge for an application being 99 cents -- a large portion of iPhone applications downloaded through the Apps Store have been free. Even so, the number is quite impressive.

Sales of third-party applications could reach $360 million in the first year alone, Jobs told The Wall Street Journal. With the 30 percent cut that Apple takes, that would mean $108 million in revenues. He also sounded quite confident that sales would accelerate.

"Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time," he mused, saying he had not seen anything like this in his career.

Much of the revenues -- $9 million -- went to the top ten developers. Sega led the pack with its Super Monkey Ball game, generating $3 million in revenues for the company across three million downloads.

Another popular title was the free drug-reference app Epocrates, which was downloaded by 125,000 people, one fifth of them doctors. The company, which shares the app's name, said it was its most successful launch of any mobile device to which it has ported a game.

Jobs also gave the first official word that iPhone 3G does indeed include code within its firmware that would allow the company to "blacklist" applications. He however argued that it was necessary to protect its customers.

He seemed to suggest that it would only be used if an application is found to be malicious after the company had approved it. In the interview, he called it "irresponsible" not to have some kind of protection at all. However, he did not specifically identify the "kill switch," as it has been dubbed, as the specific feature discovered by researcher Jonathan Zdziarski last Thursday, which some have doubted could actually serve that function.