iTunes App Store earned $3.6B since January, has now paid out $6.5 billion to developers
Apple has paid $6.5 billion to mobile app developers over the lifetime of the iTunes App Store, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced today at the company’s iPad Mini event in San Francisco. That means the App Store has generated roughly $9.3 billion in lifetime revenue, with Apple earning more than $2.8 billion from its 30 percent cut of sales.
Back in January, Apple announced that it paid $4 billion to developers, implying the App Store saw more than $5.7 billion in revenues up to that point. Today’s figures mean the App Store has generated $3.6 in revenue since the beginning of 2012, and its lifetime revenue total has increased by more than 63 percent since January.
Cook also revealed that, as of now, the Apple App Store is home to over 700,000 mobile apps and 275,000 iPad apps.
“We’ve reached another milestone — customers have downloaded 35 billion apps from the store. This is jaw dropping,” Cook said, going on to explain that the App Store continues to exceed expectations.
Cook noted the 160 million game players specifically, emphasizing the importance of mobile games in this rapid growth.
“We work hard to make sure all of our products are upgradable to the latest operating system. After just one month, we have 200 million devices running iOS 6,” Cook said, noting the quick adoption rate of the new operating system since it was introduced alongside the iPhone 5.
Touting cloud capabilities across Apple’s mobile and desktop devices, Cook said that there are currently 125 million documents in iCloud.
Cook then segued to revealing a new version of iBooks that’s better integrated with iCloud, allowing readers to start reading a book on one device and pick it back up where they left off on another. The new version of iBooks also adds a new sepia theme, continuous scrolling and the ability to share quotes from the book on Twitter and Facebook. Cook mentioned that iBooks is available in 40 languages while demoing a Korean-language book. Overall, more than 400 million books were downloaded from the iBooks store since its inception, Cook said.
