Apple's Steve Jobs to smartphone competitors: Catch us if you can.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) today is crowing about the consumer phenomenon it created around the App Store for its iPhone and iPod Touch devices, announcing today that the service's downloads have topped 1.5 billion downloads -- a sizable achievement especially considering that the store is only one year old.

The App Store also continues growing at an incredible pace, with more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers enlisted in the iPhone Developer Program, according to the company.

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

And it appears with recent enhancements to the iPhone -- like the debut of the iPhone 3GS and the new version 3.0 of its OS -- the app store will continue to do well.

That's especially true in the gaming category, one of the most popular app segments for Apple. Given its popularity, the App Store has attracted big-name players in games including Sega and Electronic Arts, as well as spurring startups such as Ngmoco.

And the appeal might not just be limited to the scale of the audience: iPhone OS 3.0 includes several game-friendly features, like a peer-to-peer function that will allow network gaming and an e-commerce tool for games, which will let players buy virtual goods.

"Developers who publish their applications on the App Store receive 70 percent of sales revenue, and do not have to pay any distribution costs for the application," Deepa Karthikeyan, senior analyst for wireless services at Current Analysis, wrote in a report on app stores. "The low-cost barriers and potentially high rewards allow small-scale developers to serve the market in exactly the same way as their larger counterparts, leveling the playing field for the first time. [iPhone OS 3.0] ... is designed to further encourage this system via some 1,000 new APIs allowing developers to offer things like subscriptions, additional game levels, and new content."

As for the "others" to which Jobs referred, they've got high aspirations of their own -- and also appear to be making headway.

Competitors include rivals such as Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry App Store, Palm's App Catalog for the Pre, Google's Android Market, Nokia's Ovi Store and Microsoft's Windows Mobile Marketplace.

Get the full story here at InternetNews.com.