Wow, Apple's App Store tops 15B app downloads, but are they new?

For all the talk about Apple innovation, it's still old school in one respect. While Google product managers make major announcements in blog posts, usually accompanied by helpful videos, information control-freak Apple does it the old-fashion way by issuing a press release. Today it's 15 billion downloads from the App Store.

I'm more surprised by timing than anything else. Apple's App Store opened for business July 10, 2008, which makes the three-year anniversary good day for the announcement. But by old school PR thinking, that would be bad day, being Sunday. Some advice to Apple: Look at Microsoft taking over Baidu English search. The news was everywhere on Monday -- and that was on July 4th, America's national holiday!

"In just three years, the revolutionary App Store has grown to become the most exciting and successful software marketplace the world has ever seen," Phi Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, says in a statement. There's nothing modest about that statement, now is there.

Perhaps the timing resonds to something else -- as does the tone of Schiller's statement. Yesterday, a federal judge denied Apple's request barring Amazon from using "App Store". The judge hasn't found the name to be all that revolutionary.

What I find most interesting: Apple didn't update the number of apps or iOS devices sold users, 425,000 and 200 million, respectively, disclosed a month ago. Perhaps management is saving up for the quarterly earnings release later this month. However, the number of app downloads is up 1 billion since June 6, which most certainly is an impressive number.

But by another measure, is it? The math is easy, dividing 200 million into 1 billion -- an average 5 apps per iOS device user over the course of a month. That assumes, of course, all iOS devices shipped are actually being used and that everyone downloads apps. Unlikely, for both.

Still, five doesn't seem like that much, given the large number of free apps and how many are games. Yesterday, Nielsen revealed that games is the most popular category (64 percent) among mobile apps downloaded by US phone users over the previous 30 days. iPhoners spend nearly twice as long playing games as the average user.

Something else, and maybe this is nitpicking: Apple doesn't use "new" to describe the number of downloads. Does the company count updates, of which there are plenty? It's a great way of jacking up the numbers, particularly when taking that old-fashion public relations approach.

BTW, the number of iPad apps is 100,000.

Today's 15 billion number comes as rumors escalate about iPhone 5 launching as early as September.