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Apple announced today that App Store sales topped $10 billion in 2013, including a record breaking $1 billion in December alone, where App Store customers downloaded almost three billion apps. Overall, Apple has paid out over $15 billion to App Store developers.
“We’d like to thank our customers for making 2013 the best year ever for the App Store,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “The lineup of apps for the holiday season was astonishing and we look forward to seeing what developers create in 2014.”
In its press release, Apple also highlighted a number of popular and emerging apps and developers while drawing special attention to a few larger developers that particularly embraced the new look and features of iOS 7, which was released in September.
Apple announced a year ago that the App Store had passed 40 billion downloads, with half of those coming in 2012. The company also announced that December 2012 brought over two billion downloads, with 500 million user accounts registered.
In May 2013, Apple hit 50 billion worldwide app downloads, which it celebrated with a promotion for a $10,000 gift card for the person who downloaded the 50 billionth app. The App Store also reached one million live apps in December.
Top Rated Comments
They're about as doomed as Microsoft or Samsung... But as we could observe more than once in the last few decades, markets, trends and hypes can change quickly and the larger a company gets, the slower it can adept and change. When the next big thing (TM) comes, Apple should better have -THE- product for that market. Only a few years ago, it was unthinkable that Blackberry and Nokia would become endangered species. There also was a time when the entire IT industry was afraid of IBM. Empires and success stories don't last forever.
As for Apple needing to have "-THE- product for that market" or else they are doomed, no, because unlike say RIM who had a single business, telephones, Apple has any number of different businesses that can alone sustain the company - Mac, iPhone, iPad, iTunes (media sales/rentals), Stores (which on their own make far more money than Amazon) - heck, even it's AppleTV hobby is something most companies can only dream about.
(Just something I noticed... That App Store icon is not even the actual icon...)
But seriously, I'm glad for this because I hope it motivates developers to continue to make quality apps. However, I wonder how much of this went to the few big name developers. Also, like others have posted, I wonder how much came from useless in all purchases for mindless games...
I'll pay for a quality app and buy in app purchases to extend functionality, but I will not pay $99.99 for "1,000,000,000,000" coins to buy a weapon or new car.