Apple today announced that its global developer community has earned over $70 billion since the App Store launched in 2008. The App Store is home to the most innovative apps in the world and in the past 12 months alone, downloads have grown over 70 percent.
“People everywhere love apps and our customers are downloading them in record numbers,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Seventy billion dollars earned by developers is simply mind-blowing. We are amazed at all of the great new apps our developers create and can’t wait to see them again next week at our Worldwide Developers Conference.”
Those numbers are just insane to think about. The types of apps being developed have become more complex in recent years, allowing us to do so much more with our iPhones and iPads. Having powerful hardware is very important, but having a thriving ecosystem of apps to run on the hardware is important too.
The App Store ecosystem earnings can probably rival some cities’ or countries’ GDP!
Is the fact that they’re announcing this now, rather than at the WWDC keynote as they tend to do, an indication that the keynote is so packed with good stuff they need to cut anything that resembles fluff?
I would be shocked if this number didn’t get a mention in the WWDC keynote. It is, after all, the Worldwide DEVELOPERS Conference.
I’d like to see these numbers broken down to see developers who are getting the majority of app revenue business.
This $70Bn figure includes In-App Purchases doesn’t it? If so, I won’t be surprised to see games dominating the top 10.
That’s a software category, yes. My question remains: how few developers (of any kind) are getting the majority of that revenue?
That’s always my first question when Apple throws these numbers around. But they’ll never break it down. Otherwise we’d see that 95% of that money goes to consumable in-app purchases and a tiny trickle goes to companies making useful software.
I’d feel better about in-app purchases if I could see that enough smaller devs were getting a significant amount of that revenue.