Outfit 7, the company behind ‘wise-cracking’ Talking Tom and friends, has reached 1bn downloads across its range of apps. 

The company has 14 characters scattered across 24 different apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, in which they mimick what the user says and do other actions on screen. Yep. The company says that its apps have more than 170m users each month, with 15m visiting every day.

Some of the apps are paid-for but others are free, with users offered the chance to buy ad-free upgrades aimed at people using the app to entertain their children, as well as a huge range of other in-app purchases. The fifth most popular in-app purchase on Talking Tom Cat 2 is a £17.49 vault of (virtual) gold coins.

The company has racked up some pretty staggering, or banal, in-app activity numbers. Talking Tom has been given 3.5bn glass of milk and 14m miles of toilet paper used by Talking Ginger. A total of 37,000 years have been spent playing with these apps since they launched in 2010. Shame on all of you.