An announcement from Apple has revealed that their Software Development Kit (SDK) has been downloaded in excess of 250,000 times since its March 6th launch. Further in the announcement Apple announced their Apps Store will be expanding to take in 62 countries, which brings a breakthrough way for developers to deliver their apps direct to an iPhone or iPod touch all over the world, to which users can download apps immediately and begin using them.

Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple, Philip Schiller says: “Developer reaction to the features, power and simplicity of the iPhone SDK has been incredible. We are seeing some truly amazing native apps from our developers and think users are going to love the breadth and depth of the applications available from the App Store.”

Developers the likes of eBay, EA, AOL, Cisco, TypePad, Epocrates, Sega, and Salesforce . com have all demonstrating impressive native apps developed using the Apple iPhone SDK.
Executive VP of AOL, Kevin Conroy says: “The SDK allowed us to build a groundbreaking new AIM client in record time. The platform’s elegance and ease of use has inspired our developers to create innovative new web and SDK based experiences for iPhone and iPod touch.”

While another vice president this time of Mobile for Fox Interactive Media, John Smelzer adds: “The iPhone SDK has given us an excellent set of tools and APIs to create mobile extensions for FIM’s entire portfolio of web brands including MySpace, IGN and Photobucket in the near term, and other properties such as FOXSports.com down the road. The popularity of the iPhone, along with the high demand for applications, gives us an amazing opportunity to create groundbreaking mobile experiences.”

The manager of Mobile Engineering, The Walt Disney Company, Jonathan Backer, also says: “As mobile developers with primarily J2ME and BREW experience, we were up and running with the iPhone within two weeks. The hardware is stable and full-featured, while the software development tools are intuitive and represent a level of polish rarely seen in the mobile arena.”

Membership to the iPhone developer Program is available worldwide while the free beta iPhone SDK can be downloaded at developer.apple.com/iphone/program. Developers set their own price for their apps which can include free, and keep seventy percent of all sales revenues.

Source — Apple