Firstly, it's great to see Steve Jobs back in the captain's chair of the starship iPhone, and he's been celebrating not only his triumphant return to work but the first anniversary of the App Store by talking up a few massive statistics.

Primarily he makes a point about the number of app downloads, which seems to be accelerating considering it's only a little over two months since the 1 billion barrier was smashed.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality," says Jobs. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

Very hard indeed, given there's now an estimated 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers vying for space on the 40 million iPhones and iPod touches Apple has shipped.

That works out at each user downloading approximately 37.5 applications each, and they are doing so with increasing regularity considering the last 500 million downloads were made two weeks faster than the previous 500 million (that's just short of an additional 16 million app downloads per week since the latter half of April).

This also suggests Apple must have some massively powerful servers looking after the App Store, since an average application size of just 2MB (which is quite a frugal assumption) works out at over 3000 petabytes being shunted through the online store. Using the iPhone's wi-fi connection, it'd take approximately 316,877 years for a single user to receive that much data.

Jobs is quite right. Numbers like these are very difficult to compete with.