App Store surpasses 40 billion downloads, with 20 billion in 2012

Apple on Monday announced that the App Store has eclipsed 40 billion downloads since its inception--with nearly 20 billion of those downloads coming in 2012. By Macworld's back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's close to 800,000,000,000 individual unhappy birds alone.

Among the other numbers Apple crowed over in its announcement: There are more than 500 million active iTunes accounts in the App Store, and Apple saw more than 2 billion app downloads in the month of December alone. Developers have built more than 775,000 apps, Apple says, earning more than $7 billion in payouts.

Apple stresses that the 40 billion total downloads is really as impressive as it sounds; the company says that those numbers do not include re-downloads or app updates.

In its release, Apple name drops a variety of hugely successful apps, including Temple Run, Fipboard, Uber, and Action Movie FX.

The App Store launched in 2008 with 552 apps. If it continues to grow at its current pace, experts predict that more than eleventy quadrillion apps will be downloaded next Thursday. Approximately.