Apple has announced that the App Store for the iPhone / iPod Touch has now seen more than 2 billion downloads of applications, with a half billion programs in the last quarter alone.

In addition, the company revealed that the total number of apps in the store currently exceeds 85,000, and that they are now available to more than 50 million customers in 77 countries.

AppleInsider does a fine job crunching the numbers. Most noteworthy fact is that the App Store hit 1 billion downloads on April 23 of this year and 1.5 billion last July, which means the rate of daily downloads is quickly accelerating.

Anyone want to make a bet for when the number of downloads will top 3 billion?