Apple App Store Is Apple’s Actual Cash Cow. Here’s Proof.

The Store is so big, that most banks could borrow their annual spend from it!

The New Year began brightly for Apple — in the truest sense of the term as it’s App Store bagged a whopping USD 240 million in purchases.
While the holiday period itself worked its magic for Apple, the first day of 2017 was the star of the show — it was the busiest single day on New Year’s Day ever.

Why? Well, may be because the first day of 2017 was a Sunday and all those who were tired after their wild parties from the previous night decided to while away the day by purchasing games from the App Store.

Also, since subscriptions were relaxed and available across all 25 app categories including the likes of Games and Kids, users could subscribe to their favourite services from over 20,000 apps — with Netflix, HBO Now, Line, Tinder and MLB.com at bat.

To provide you with the numbers and put things into perspective, since 2008, when the App Store was launched, the developers have managed to earn over USD 60 billion as they created awesome app experiences for the users across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac.

In 2016 itself, developers bagged over USD 20 billion which is up by over 40% in comparison to 2015. Perhaps these efforts that have now dovetailed into USD 240 million purchases on the first day of 2017.

These figures clearly denote the rise that the company has developed over years. The holiday season seems to be a perfect happy hunting ground for Apple’s App Store as a lot of people download apps and played games on the devices many of which might have been received as gifts.

“2016 was a record-shattering year for the App Store, generating $20 billion for developers, and 2017 is off to a great start with January 1 as the single biggest day ever on the App Store,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.
“We want to thank our entire developer community for the many innovative apps they have created — which together with our products — help to truly enrich people’s lives.”

In December 2016, the purchases from the App Store touched the highest as it touched USD 3 billion. At the same time, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run made a monumental mark of 40 million downloads in just four days after its release and became the most downloaded app globally on Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Pokemon Go, undoubtedly emerged at the top of 10 most downloaded apps worldwide. Pokemon Go became a rage in mid-2016 itself.
Prisma, Reigns, Procreate, Lumino City, Sweat With Kayla and djay Pro, from some of Apple’s independent developers, were among the most successful apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch and Mac, respectively.

Apple’s App Store has its reach across 155 countries and the top-grossing markets include the US, China, Japan and the UK. The kind of global attention that Apple’s App store enjoys can be illustrated with the two campaigns in the past year — Apps for Earth and Games for (RED).
The campaigns sure have made substantial contribution in the form of helping protect life on Earth and encouraging people to join the fight against AIDS, in association with the World Wildlife Fund.

App experiences on the App Store too have improved. With the introduction of iMessage apps and SiriKit in iOS 10, developers have been able to create new and exciting type of app experiences. So much so, users on iPhone and iPad have access to over 21,000 iMessage apps to send stickers and easily team up with friends and Siri.

So, much as everyone looks and rattles off sales numbers for Apple’s iPhones and the (dwindling) numbers for it’s iPads, one must remember to keep an eye out to the cashier window that is the App Store, because that’s where a bulk of Apple’s moolah is coming in.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.