1,000,000 apps have been created for iOS (but Android is in hot pursuit)

According to social app discovery company Appsfire, today is the day that marks the one million apps have been created for Apple’s app store:

Breaking: today will mark the day the App store has seen 1 million apps ever created since launch (iOS)

— Appsfire (@appsfire) November 19, 2012

Appsfire did not provide details on those apps, or how it arrived at that number, but 148Apps says that the total number of apps approved for the U.S. app store is 991,836, with 727,938 active apps and 263,898 inactive apps from almost 200,000 app publishers.

Those numbers are not yet updated for November, since 148Apps updates at the end of every month, but app submissions are running at about 30,000 each month, so the million apps number seems credible.

At Apple’s big product release event in October, CEO Tim Cook said that there were now 700,000 apps in the app store — 275,000 of which are built for iPad — which corresponds well to 148Apps’ number of active apps. He also said that Apple customers had at that point downloaded over 35 billion apps to their iDevices, and that Apple had paid out $6.5 billion to app developers.

That compares to Apple’s chief mobile rival Android’s app availability numbers of about 700,000 according to Google, though AppBrain puts the number at 562,126 with another 17,000 or so being added every month. At the 700,000 number, Google Play is clearly catching up to Apple’s app store. And, with Android at 75 percent mobile market share, it seems clear that the massive lead Apple’s app store once had will soon be a thing of the past.

The iPhone was first launched in June 2007 without an app store — remember how Apple was very big on web apps at first? It wasn’t until a year later that the app store was launched, in July 2008, as an update to Apple’s iTunes.

You’ve come a long way, baby.