January 6, 2016, Apple revealed a report that showed customers made more than $1.1 billion worth of apps and in-app purchases. The last holiday season that ended January 3 was a record-breaking season for the App Store.
With January 1st, 2016, being the most profitable single day in the history of the App Store; people spent over $144 million on apps and in-apps purchases, beating the previous record made just a week before Christmas Day.
For the entire year 2015, App Store is said to have made a sale worth over $20 billion. With every purchase made on App Store, Apple gets 30 percent cut, meaning Apple got $6 billion in 2015. A Nielsen report tabled last month revealed that Google apps are by far the most widely used apps with five apps in the top 10 most popular apps, followed by Facebook with three apps out of 10. Apple came in at third place with only two apps out of the top 10 most popular apps; the Pandora Radio and iTunes Radio/iCloud.
However, when you look at the monetization of the apps and not just their popularity, Apple has traditionally generated higher revenue that its chief competition, Google. This fact is mainly because typically, Apple devices users (iPhone, iPad, and iPod) are more likely to spend higher on apps and games than the typical Android devices would. For this reasons, most developers will gravitate towards the iOS development platform. Traditionally App Store apps fetch higher prices than Google Play apps.
According to Apple, App Store developers have made sales to the tune of $40 billion since 2008. A little over a third of these were made in 2015 alone. The most popular App Store categories over the year 2015 were social networking, gaming and entertainment apps. Apple identified apps like Minecraft, Trivia Crack, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Pocket Edition to be particularly popular among iOS devices users. Games and subscription apps like Netflix, Hulu, Monster Strike and Clash of Clans made top-grossing on App Store over last year.
In the previous years, Apple had only three devices on which consumers consumed apps; the iPhone, iPad and iPod. However, come 2015 going forward, Apple added the Apple Watch and Apple TV making a total of five Apple devices that can be used to buy apps from the App Store ecosystem.
For the Apple TV ecosystem, Apple said apps such as the Rayman Adventures, HBO Now and Beat Sports to be the most popular. For the Apple Watch, apps like the Nike+ Running, iTranslate, Citymapper and Lifesum were the top used apps.
According to a research study by the Progressive Policy Institute, Apple created over 1.4 million jobs in the US. These jobs were in the ecosystem of app developers, software engineers and even non-IT jobs that supported either directly or indirectly the app economy.