Apple App Store nets US$30 million in sales in first month

The Wall Street Journal has been told by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that iPhone users have downloaded more than 60 million applications from the App Store in its first 30 days of operation. As expected, most of the downloaded apps were free of charge, but sales still reached a million U.S. dollars a day on average, totalling US$30 million for the first month. Jobs said that his company's 30% share of the sales revenue won't account to much in terms of profits for Apple since most of it will go toward credit card processing fees and the costs associated with running the App Store itself.

Jobs also confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that its latest iPhone firmware has an "application kill switch" that will let it remotely shut down any application that it finds necessary. This raised a lot of concerns with the internet community when it was first discovered by a non-Apple software engineer, but Jobs and Apple claim that it is necessary to have such a capability in the event that a harmful application were to make it past the App Store's screening process. Jobs was quoted as saying "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull."