It's been nearly four months since Steve Jobs' missive entitled, "Thoughts on Flash," where, in addition to a fairly scathing retort at Adobe's Flash platform, the Apple CEO noted that the company's App Store carried more than 200,000 applications at the time of the letter's writing.

Move over, old metric, because the App Store recently hit a quarter-million apps—all of two years and 49 days since the service's inception. And there's no indication that iPhone and iPad developers are slowing their efforts in any way.

After all, Apple just breached the 100,000 application mark on in November 2009 and leaped over the 150,000 barrier in February of 2010. It's been taking roughly three to four months for Apple to pile on 50,000 new apps or thereabouts, but this time window has shortened considerably since the service's birth in July 2008.

According to metrics by 148apps.biz, it took Apple around 11 months to achieve its first 50,000 active applications on the App Store. From there, the App Store ramped up quite dramatically and spit out an additional 50,000 in less than half the time, or approximately four to five months. It took around three months after that for the App Store to acquire 150,000 applications, and then roughly three additional months to jump from 150,000 to 200,000.

Assuming, of course, that the three-months-or-so growth rate stays constant, that puts Apple on track for hitting half-a-million active applications in 18 months, or right at the end of 2011 / beginning of 2012. Up until this point, the App Store has enjoyed approximately 323 new uploads for every day of its existence—that's not really an "average per day" amount, given the service's gradual ramp-up, but a fun statistic nevertheless.

An analysis of the App Store by 148apps.biz reveals—unsurprisingly--that applications outnumber games on the App Store by a ratio of 5.8 to one, or 200,000 active applications to 34,000 games. In actuality, more than 300,000 applications have been uploaded to the App Store throughout its existence. Nearly 50,000 of these are since inactive, or no longer available for download by users. As well, slightly more than 50,000 publishers are now counted as active contributors to the store.

And, for those curious, 148apps.biz revealed that—of the programs analyzed—it would cost a user around $673,362 to buy every single application and game in the store. This total includes the 83,000 applications and games priced at $1… as well as the five programs priced at $1,000. Slightly more than 74,000 applications and games are completely free.