Apple announced on Tuesday that over 1.5 billion applications have been downloaded from the App Store in the past 12 months. The store served up its first billion downloads in April, and managed to ramp up the pace and dole out another half billion in the past three months.

"The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality," commented Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."

According to Apple, over 65,000 applications are available for the iPhone and iPod touch at its iTunes-based App Store.

Thanks to the increased number of downloads in the past three months, Apple is averaging about 4.1 million downloads a day since the online store opened. In comparison, that daily average was about 3.4 million in April.

So far, Apple has sold more that 40 million iPhone and iPod touch units, all of which are capable of taking advantage of the App Store. As more new users come on board thanks to the recently released iPhone 3GS and the US$99 iPhone 3G, the number of app downloads per day will likely increase even more.

The company isn't saying, however, how many of those downloads are first-time downloads, duplicate downloads by the same user, or app updates. Regardless of whether or not there are any duplicate downloads in the tally, Apple seems to be able to serve up iPhone and iPod touch applications about as fast as some fast food establishments dole out hamburgers.