While talk of flatline growth dominated media responses to Apple's financial results yesterday, the massive growth of Apple's cloud-based services appeared to go largely unnoticed.
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In 2012, reports iPodNN, the number of iCloud users grew from 85 million to over 250 million. iTunes subscribers have topped 500 million, generating a record $2.1 billion profit for the quarter.
iMessage has also proven to be a hugely popular service, with users sending over two billion messages a day from over 500 million devices, with the total iMessage count now having surpassed 450 billion. Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the focus on online and web services during yesterday's conference call:
In terms of other services, we feel fantastic about how we're doing. In Notification Center, we've now sent over 4 trillion notifications, and this is mind-blowing. As Peter mentioned in his opening comment, for iMessage we've now sent over 450 billion and are currently sending those over 2 billion per day. With Game Center, we've got over 200 million registered users. We have 800,000 apps on the App Store with over 40 billion downloads. And so I feel really, really great about it. There is obviously more stuff we can do and you can bet we're thinking about all of it.
Cook has repeatedly referred to iCloud as a "strategy for the next decade" for Apple. He has also characterized the increasing reliance and trust consumers place on cloud-based storage and services as "truly profound" and "a fundamental shift" in the way content is accessed.
Top Rated Comments
Its these services that tie all my Apple products together is why having an iPhone is so important to me.
Humor bro, it was an attempt at humor. If you knew any teenagers it probably would have made more sense.
It's enabled by default to replace text messaging. Half the people who use it don't even know they're using it. It's not popular in the traditional sense where something new comes out that everybody wants to get and use.