GetJar will no doubt be hoping the wide speculation regarding just which third-party app store can claim to be the biggest will be put to bed today, with the firm announcing its marketplace has hit the 1 billion downloads mark.

The figure – which, as GetJar reports in dramatic fashion, was hit by the purchase of Geodelic on an Android handset at 11.02 am on June 7th – puts GetJar comfortably ahead of its third-party based competition.

Indeed, GetJar is in fact the first third-party marketplace to hit 1 billion downloads, and only the second in total, Apple having hit the same milestone back at the end of April last year.

As a result, it's no great leap to discover that GetJar has also beaten both Android and Nokia's Ovi Store to the 1 billion downloads mark.

GetJar on the go

"We're delighted to have reached this milestone in mobile app history," said company CEO and founder Ilja Laurs.

"As a team, we're dedicated to driving the app market forward through an open approach. We've supported over 60,000 apps from developers across all major platforms, and our open philosophy has been integral to our continued growth and the development within the industry. We're looking forward to the next billion downloads."

The figure represents some rate of acceleration, with GetJar having only hit the 500,000,000 mark back in June last year – more than five years after the company first launched in Lithuania, as a resource for testing and evaluating Java apps.

GetJar currently has more than 316,000 developers signed up to its marketplace, with over 71,000 apps available for download in total.