APPetite for Disruption

This morning, Apple raised the curtain on iTunes 7.7 and on App Store, an outlet for third-party iPhone and iPod Touch applications. “The reaction has been so strong,” said Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs. “So many developers responded. This is the biggest launch of my career.”

And with 522 applications debuting at the store today (135 of them free, 417 of them paid; see chart below), it would seem to be just that. It’s also likely one of the most important, an effort to do to the mobile-software market what iTunes did to the digital music market, to do to the mobile OS what Microsoft did to the desktop OS. An ambitious undertaking, but one for which Apple seems well positioned, initally, anyway. “Everybody wants to build an iPhone app,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told The New York Times. “It’s pretty rare you hear things like this. The enthusiasm is surprising.”

You’ll find the store’s “Top Apps” here, its “Top Free Apps” here and the iPhone 2.0 firmware update you need to use them here.