Mike Lazaridis, the belegaured co-head of RIM, took the stage at DevCon Americas to announce some strong numbers. First, RIM has just announced 1 billion App World downloads, which amounts to about 5 million downloads per day. The service is on pace to hit 2 billion this year. Mike went on to proudly state that on average, a BlackBerry app is downloaded 43% more than its iOS or Android counterpart. Part of this success is thanks to the smaller library amount but also because the BlackBerry App World is now available in 130 counties and supports 26 currencies with carrier billing in 10 countries.
The platform is still going strong with 165 million RIM smartphones in current circulation and there has been an 80% increase in BBM users this year, up to 50 million.
Lazaridis apologized for the recent outage and reiterated his promise to supply $100 in apps and services to every Blackberry user, thanking partners for their largesse. The initial statistics were fairly slim and RIM didn’t break out sales of phones vs. Playbook tablets.