The iTunes App Store Rolls with the Travel Season

Sometime last week, the iTunes app store passed 70,000 unique apps (70K apps have appeared in the app store since it launched). One of the fastest-growing categories in the U.S. iTunes app store has been Travel, displacing Education to move into the top 5 largest categories. Welcome to summer vacation!

Next to the Book category, Travel is the most competitive category, with each seller averaging about 6 unique apps during the most recent week. A quick inspection of recently released Travel apps included a lot of travel guides -- which like the Book apps, are fairly easy to create compared to apps in other categories.

The other milestone I wanted to highlight is the iPhone's growing importance to Apple's bottom line. Two years after its launch, last quarter was the first time the iPhone surpassed the iPod in terms of revenue:

In a recent conference call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that one of the main reasons for developing the iPhone was the anticipated drop-off in sales of iPod products. What's been impressive is how things worked out exactly as Apple hoped: the transition from one product line to the next has been remarkably smooth.

Data for this post was through the week ending 8/9/2009, and covers the U.S. iTunes app store.