It seems like Apple has found a new gold mine with their recently launched AppStore. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that since the  initial launch, the iPhone users have downloaded more than 60 million programs.

Steve Jobs has offered an interesting insight about the financial status of AppStore. According to Jobs, AppStore sold an average of $1 million a day in applications for a total of about $30 million in sales over the month.

Steve Jobs noted that it the sale will continue in the same manner, Apple stands to earn at least $360 million a year in new revenue from the App Store.

"This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," Jobs told the journal adding that it may be a "$1 billion marketplace at some point in time."

Launched on July 10, the AppStore offers third-party applications to iPhone and iPod Touch users. Apparently, around a quarter of these are free, while most of the rest cost less than $10. About a third are games. The applications can only run on iPhones and iPod Touches updated to the latest firmware, 2.0, or on the iPhone 3G which includes the new firmware. There's also the need to upgrade to iTunes 7.7.
Practically, every developer can submit their applications to the AppStore. If it gets accepted, Apple would retain 30 percent of all sales revenues. Users can download free applications at no charge to either the user or developer, or purchase priced applications with just one click. Third party iPhone and iPod touch applications must be approved by Apple and will be available exclusively through the App Store.
According to another estimate released by Apple in July, the AppStore sold 10 million applications in its first four days.

However, its’ very likely that soon the AppStore will face some serious competition. In June, during the Google I/O developer conference, Andy Rubin, Android project leader, hinted about an application similar to AppStore, from where the users will be able to securely download content provided by the community of Android developers.

Also, in June, Nokia, the main investor in Symbian, owning 48 percent of the company, acquired the remaining 52 percent of the company’s shares and turn it into a non profit foundation.
The new formed foundation has a board of directors that will be equally divided between the partners of the deal which include mobile phone manufacturers Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson, Samsung and LG, chip manufacturers Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics NV, and wireless operators Vodafone, AT&T and NTT DoCoMo.

The move is part of Nokia’s strategy of establishing its mobile operating system as the leading one on the market as it faces an increased competition from Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows for mobile devices, Google’s soon to be released Android and Research in Motion’s platform for its Blackberry devices, as well as a mobile version of Linux, dubbed LiMo.

In other news, during the same interview, Steve Jobs confirmed last week’s rumors that

iPhones routinely check an Apple Web site that could, in theory trigger the removal of the undesirable software from the devices.

Jobs refuted the privacy accusations and explained that Apple needs that piece of code in case it inadvertently allows a malicious program to be distributed to iPhones through the App Store. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he says.