It may seem hard to believe for those who have been using the iPhone or the iPod Touch since the beginning, but Apple is celebrating the fifth anniversary of their “app” store this week. And in order to mark the momentous occasion, Apple is offering a few of the most popular games and applications in their inventory for free.

The giveaway promotion will allow users of Apple’s mobile iOS devices–the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad–to download 10 in-demand titles that have until now only been available on a pay basis. The selection includes five practical applications and five gaming apps. On the app side, users will be able to explore an interactive globe with “Barefoot World Atlas,” keep a multimedia daily journal with “Day One,” peruse a plethora of gourmet recipes with “How to Cook Everything,” add captions and logos to photos with “Over,” or mix tracks like a pro with “Traktor DJ.”

Gamers will have an equal number of intriguing free downloads at their fingertips, with games like the action-packed and award-winning “Badland,” an epic fantasy yarn called “Infinity Blade II,” an 8-bit, puzzle-based adventure titled “Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP,” the race-against-time favorite, “Tiny Wings,” and a tricky puzzle game called “Where’s My Water?”

The fifth anniversary–which will officially strike on Wednesday, July 10–will mark the end of a fast-paced and highly successful opening phase for Apple’s app store. Since the 2008 opening, the app store inventory has grown exponentially, expanding from an initial offering of roughly 500 games and apps to a sprawling collection of more than 900,000. In addition to the free downloads, the app store’s “fifth anniversary” feature boasts a tab that will allow users to look back at a few of the other notable milestones that have graced the five-year timeline. Significant events have included the 2010 feature of “Angry Birds”–now one of the most popular games on any mobile platform–and a 25 billion download benchmark, which was shattered just last year.

The path to five years and more than 50 billion app downloads has mirrored the meteoric success of apps in general, and in connection, of the smartphone craze. The first iPhone released on June 29, 2007, over a year before Steve Jobs and the rest of the team at Apple had put in enough work to launch the app store officially. When the store did go live–on July 10, 2008, with 552 apps on its virtual shelves and support for audiences in 62 countries worldwide–it was the beginning of a revolution. In only took until September for the store to clear the 100 million download milestone, with the Facebook app leading the charge, and an array of both free and paid apps following in its footsteps.

Of course, Apple’s competitors weren’t going to let the company simply rule the roost as they had with MP3 players and the iPod several years before. In September of 2008, Android launched the first incarnation of its app store, alongside its first smartphone models. In April of the following year, Blackberry followed suit. Apps, it seemed, were taking over.

To suit the vast and swift increase in demand for apps, developers flooded the marketplace. By January 2009, less than six months after the Apple app store’s opening day, the number of titles had increased by nearly 30 times. Standing out from the crowd quickly became as much of a concern for app developers as it was for musicians and other artists. Publications or columns sprang up across the blogosphere and around the net, touting the “best” and most useful titles on the app store and pointing iOS users toward the essential downloads so that sorting through the thousands and thousands of titles was no longer a necessity.

Growth has hardly slowed or plateaued since then. In 2010, the iPad, popular games like “Angry Birds,” and a revolutionary app from Netflix–which brought streaming video to mobile devices in a big way for the first time–rocketed Apple’s app store into the next rung of pop cultural ubiquity. In June of 2010, Apple revealed that it had paid over $1 billion to app developers alone since the launch of the store, bringing even more titles to the marketplace as more and more people tried to get their hands on a chunk of the money.

By 2011, nearly every magazine and major publication was available on subscription basis through the store. In addition, the release of the iPhone 4S saw the arrival of the now-commonplace virtual assistant known as Siri, but most iOS users still don’t know that Siri originally emerged as an app. Apple execs were so impressed with the technology that they decided to integrate it directly into their devices.

Now, after another busy year in 2012, the app store is still continuing its unstoppable growth. The market topped 50 billion downloads in May of this year, and Apple has paid out more than $10 billion to developers in the five years since the app store launched. If the numbers say anything, it’s that the app industry is growing into a true entertainment juggernaut that could one day stand alongside film, music, television, and book publishing as a huge financial faction. And Apple, with its precedent-breaking foray into apps and its popular “there’s an app for that” catchphrase, is still leading the charge.