Apple CEO Tim Cook said on today’s company earnings call that there are over 3,500 apps available at launch for the Apple Watch, which is better than the 1,000 total that were ready for iPad when that device launched in April of 2010, and 7 times the 500 apps available when the iPhone’s App Store first debuted in July 2008.
The Apple Watch launched on Friday, and developers have been able to submit apps to the Store for approval since March 31, 2015. The company revealed the Apple Watch last fall, and made the initial WatchKit tools, along with the iOS 8.2 beta to support it, available beginning in November 2014.
“We’re far ahead from where we expected to be from an application point of view,” Cook said in today’s briefing. “We had an internal goal of beating that 1,000 [that the iPad had] and we exceeded that.”
Software is a key selling tool for Apple Watch, and clearly Apple did as much as it could to populate the launch library with a wide variety of software. The Apple Watch lacked the iPad’s advantage of being able to run unmodified iPhone apps in compatibility mode, too, which means a healthy collection was even more important to initial impressions.
