It took Apple almost two years to pay app developers $1 billion of shared revenue from App Store sales, but it took the company only 3 days to cross the $1 billion revenue mark with its iPhone 4.

Apple today said that it has sold more than 1.7 million units of its iPhone 4 between June 24 and June 26. “This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

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As it is widely believe that Apple charges AT&T and retailers close to $600 for the 16 GB version of the iPhone and almost $700 for the 32 GB model, the iPhone 4 generated somewhere between $1.02 billion and $1.19 billion in sales for Apple in just 3 days.

The original iPhone needed 74 days to move 1 million units and the recently launched iPad needed about one month. The iPhone 3G, launched in 2008, sold 1 million units in 3 days.

Apple said that 600,000 orders for the iPhone were placed on the first day the pre-ordering system for the device went live. Apple did not say whether it plans to react to wireless reception problems that surfaced over the weekend. The rumor mill suggests that a firmware update may be on the way to fix the issue.

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