Apple's 1 billionth app download predicted for 23 April

(Credit: Apple)

We could stare at the countdown tickers on Worldometers all day. Wow, 10.3 billion toilets have been flushed so far today! So it's no wonder we love the Apple App store contest with its mesmerising flipping numbers counting us down to the one billionth app download, when some lucky punter will win shed-loads of Mac stuff and a US$10,000 iTunes gift card.

As the hour approaches — we're topping 990 million and change at the time of this writing — Mobile Squared, a UK research company, is helping us game the system by figuring out when the crucial moment will occur. According to its totally unchecked calculations, D-Day is this Thursday afternoon, 23 April, UK time (Friday morning in Australia) — so that's two days for another 10 million downloads, app fans.

Mobile Squared notes that it took almost six months to reach its 500 million app downloads on 19 January, and the following 500 million downloads have taken just 94 days, so the rate is picking up.

If you want to get in on the action, you don't even need an iPhone or iPod Touch: just enter online at the Apple website. We'd love the irony if an Apple hater won, so get involved.