Apple’s Mac App Store has hit a significant and impressive milestone. The company announced today that the store has seen over 100 million app downloads – in less than one year.

Of course, that sounds like a lot – and it is. But remember that the App Store (generic) has seen over 18 billion apps downloaded, and the current rate exceeds 1 billion apps per month.

The Mac App Store was announced back in November of 2010 and eventually released to the masses in January of 2011. After only one day in existence, Apple reported that the app downloads had topped one million.

Phil Schiller had this to say about the milestone:

In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry. With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.

For app developers, it appears the the Mac App Store has been a huge help – allowing easy distribution and a wider reach than they could have imagined.

“The Mac App Store has unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and development cycle,” said Saulius Dailide of Pixelmator. “Offering Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image editing software and stay ahead of the competition.”

“In less than one year we’ve shifted the distribution of djay for Mac exclusively to the Mac App Store,” said Karim Morsy, CEO of algoriddim. “With just a few clicks, djay for Mac is available to customers in 123 countries worldwide. We could never have that reach through traditional channels.”