Over 3,500 apps already available for the Apple Watch

Apple CEO, Tim Cook, said yesterday at the compeny’s earnings call that there are already over 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch, which is better than the total that were available for the iPad (1000) when it launched, ad 7 times more than the 500 apps that were initially available when the iPhone’s App store debuted in July 2008.

Developers have been able to submit apps to the store for approval since March 31, 2015, much before the watch was launched last Friday. Apple revealed the watch last year, making the initial WatchKit tools, along with the iOS 8.2 beta which supports it, available in November 2014.

“We’re far ahead from where we expected to be from an application point of view,” the Apple CEO said in yesterday’s briefing. “We had an internal goal of beating that 1,000 [that the iPad had] and we exceeded that.”

Software is very essential selling tool for the Apple Watch, and Apple obviously did as much as it could to make a wide variety of software available for the launch library.

The Apple Watch didn’t have the iPad’s ability to run unmodified iPhone apps in compatibility mode, too, which means that a robust collection was important to initial impressions.