Apple has a long way to go to catch up to the 100+ billion hamburgers that McDonalds has served, but they’re clearly closing the gap quickly. They currently sit at 9.7 billion applications downloaded in their worldwide App Store and the number is rapidly increasing by the second. As they hurtle towards ten billion downloads, Apple has decided to offer a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the person who pushes the counter to eleven digits.
As with any contest, the list of rules is long and raises some interesting questions. For example, one of the rules of the contest states that, “entries are limited to individual consumers only; commercial enterprises and business entities are not eligible.” Does this mean people who own corporate iPhones are ineligible, and if so, does the prize go to the person downloading the 10,000,000,000,001st application from the store?
If you don’t have an iPod or iPhone, you can still win the prize by submitting an online form with your contact information as well as your birth date. Each entry via the web is counted as a downloaded application as it relates to the 10 billion download mark. Don’t think you can be tricky by writing an app to constantly fill in the form though! Apple’s lawyers have already considered that and as a result have limited the number of times you can enter per day to 25. The use of software to automatically enter the sweepstakes is also expressing forbidden.
It would be great if the app that tipped the scales was one written by a member of Neowin. Maybe our very own Brenton Currie’s public service application for folks in the flooded area of Queensland, Australia will be the winning application!
Image Courtesy of Apple.com