Apple’s Boss Steve Jobs told the WSJ that iPhone apps are making the company $1 million a day. So far the company has made $30 million over the past month. I is pretty good I must say given that most of the apps are free and only a small percentage actually purchase apps.

If sales stay at the current pace, Apple stands to reap at least $360 million a year in new revenue from the App Store, Mr. Jobs said.

“This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” he added. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” he said.

Apple isn’t likely to derive much in the way of direct profit from the business, Mr. Jobs acknowledged. It is keeping only 30% of the proceeds from application sales — about enough to cover expenses from credit-card transactions and other costs of running the online store — while the programs’ creators keep 70%.

Mr. Jobs said developers’ share of iPhone application sales in the first month was about $21 million, of which the top 10 developers earned roughly $9 million.

Mr. Jobs is betting applications will sell more iPhones and wireless-enabled iPod touch devices, enhancing the appeal of the products in the same way music sold through Apple’s iTunes has made iPods more desirable.

“Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that,” Mr. Jobs said. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.”