During the Super Bowl adverts, some technology observers noticed that special AppStore.com links were appearing to promote certain applications. These were introduced on Friday, but news coverage was minimal. Essentially AppStore.com/AppName will take you to the app, and AppStore.com/DeveloperName will take you to a page showing all the apps from the developer.

AppStore.com was acquired by Apple back in 2008 however they haven’t used the domain for anything before. It might be to do with legal battles with Amazon and Microsoft covering their use of the ‘App Store’ name – they’ve been trying to get a trademark on the “app store” title without success.

The App Store now has roughly 800,000 mobile apps, on par with Android and beating any other mobile OS. 339,000 were released in 2012 – nearly 1,000 apps a day. Of course these are only the apps that are approved and haven’t yet been removed – if you include removed apps some estimates put it at over a million.  No numbers are released on the amount of apps that are rejected.

This is a good step for Apple – at the moment App Store links are long and complicated making it difficult to promote. Developers currently just ask people to search for the app, and it can make sharing apps hard.