Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Free Before App Store's Anniversary
Apple's App Store to celebrate its fifth birthday Wednesday.
July 8, 2013 — -- It's a good day to go app shopping.
A number of the most popular paid iPhone and iPad apps are now available for free in a promotional offering before the fifth anniversary of Apple's App Store. Wednesday will be five years since the app store was launched.
Barefoot World Atlas, a beautiful interactive atlas app typically priced at $4.99, is marked as free. But there're bigger savings, too. Traktor DJ, an app that's popular among DJs and allows you to mix songs, is marked as free, down from $19.99.
There are games, too: The $6.99 price of "Infinity Blade II" has been cut down to zero and $0.99 games like "Tiny Wings" and "Where's My Water?" are also completely free. Apple has launched a section of the App Store to show all of the 10 free apps and games as well as timeline of the App Store milestones.
While Apple doesn't explicitly say how long the apps will remain free, Max Whitby, the CEO of Touch Press, the company that makes the Barefoot World Atlas app, told ABC News that the app will remain free all week.
"Barefoot World Atlas went free this morning and will remain so all this week to help celebrate five years of the App Store," Whitby told ABC News today via email. "Today's promotion is another step down the road to help spread the word [about our apps].
"In marketing apps you have to consider the big picture. The loss of one week's paid sales is far outweighed by the wider gain in awareness."
Apple sent out a timeline last week of the App Store's biggest milestones in the past five years to ABC News and other media outlets. The free apps were first spotted by technology website The Verge.
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The app store was released July 10, 2008, with 500 apps. Ten million apps were downloaded in the first weekend. In May 2013, Apple announced it had seen 50 billion app downloads since launching the store.
Google's Android marketplace, or Google Play Store, has been on Apple's heels with 48 billion app downloads announced in May. When Google's Play celebrated its first birthday in March, it also offered discounts on popular apps, movies, books and magazines.