BlackBerry App World, Research in Motion’s (News - Alert) hub for application distribution for BlackBerry devices, reached a new milestone as of late as the service now plays host to more than 70,000 apps.

The three-year-old App World has reached two billion cumulative app downloads, with six million downloads per day and 177 million app downloads every month. RIM’s Developer Relations team revealed the latest figures at a HTML5 hackathon, which was held at Pace University in New York City.

This means there has been a significant bump in the number of apps in App World since last month, when the company revealed that there were more than 60,000 apps available through the service. The number of daily app downloads has also risen from 174 million.

The sharp uptick in the number of apps on the store can be partly attributed to a program RIM announced in February. The company offered a free 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to eligible developers who converted an Android (News - Alert) app for use on the tablet and submitted it to App World within a certain time period.

This initiative generated more than 1,500 app submissions, with more than 6,600 new developers becoming BlackBerry (News - Alert)-associated developers.

The steady growth of App World will come as welcome news to RIM, which announced poor quarterly financial results last week.

Recently, the company announced a loss of $125 million, contrasting with the $934 million profit it saw in the same quarter in 2011. Revenue fell 25 percent to $4.19 billion. Shipments of handsets shipments fell by 21 percent, from 14.9 million to 11.1 million worldwide. This was despite the fact the smartphone market as a whole is growing at around 39 percent annually.

Though BlackBerry App World is continuing to grow, it pales in comparison with Apple’s (News - Alert) App Store, which now plays host to more than 585,000 applications. Total downloads from the App Store hit 25 billion last month.