Apple closed 2025 with its services business posting its strongest year to date, driven by higher engagement across major platforms, continued geographic expansion, and a steady rollout of incremental feature updates rather than headline-grabbing overhauls. The results underline how services have become a central pillar of Apple’s business, complementing hardware sales while smoothing revenue volatility.
The App Store remained the foundation of that ecosystem. Apple says it averaged more than 850 million weekly users across 175 countries and regions during the year, reflecting both the scale of its installed base and sustained user engagement. Since launching in 2008, developers have earned more than $550 billion through the App Store. Looking more broadly at commerce enabled by the platform, Apple estimates that in 2024 the App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in billings and sales, with over 90 percent of that activity flowing directly to developers rather than to Apple itself. Holiday periods were particularly strong, with record traffic and spending between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, led by productivity, photo, video, and education apps.
Other services also reached notable benchmarks. Apple Pay generated more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales globally while helping reduce fraud by over $1 billion, according to Apple and industry data. The service continued to expand its footprint and is now available in 89 markets, supported by more than 11,000 banks and payment partners. During peak holiday shopping periods, Apple Pay transactions grew faster than overall consumer spending, suggesting increasing consumer comfort with mobile payments.
Streaming and media services posted mixed but generally positive results. Apple TV recorded its highest-ever monthly engagement in December, with total viewing hours up 36 percent year over year. Growth was strongest in Europe and Latin America, alongside continued gains in the U.S. Apple Music also reported its best year on record in terms of listenership and new subscribers, helped by feature additions such as AutoMix, Lyrics Translation, and expanded discovery tools. Meanwhile, Shazam surpassed one billion song recognitions per month, reinforcing its role as a standalone entry point into Apple’s music ecosystem.
Apple also emphasized incremental improvements across everyday services. Apple Maps expanded its detailed city experiences and introduced more personalized routing features using on-device processing. Apple Wallet added new identity, travel, and order-tracking capabilities, including the first international government ID support in Japan and expanded digital ID use in the U.S. Find My broadened airline partnerships to reduce lost luggage incidents, while iCloud and iCloud+ continued to anchor shared experiences, storage, and privacy-focused features.
Fitness+ and Apple Arcade focused on geographic reach and content depth rather than radical redesigns. Fitness+ expanded to 28 additional markets and added multilingual support through digitally dubbed workouts. Arcade added more than 50 new games and hundreds of updates, maintaining its ad-free positioning for families and casual players.
Looking ahead, Apple frames services growth as an ongoing process rather than a finished transformation. The company continues to position privacy, on-device intelligence, and ecosystem integration as its differentiators, while using steady feature expansion to keep users engaged. Whether that approach can sustain momentum as competition intensifies across payments, media, and AI-powered services will likely shape how Apple’s services business evolves beyond its record-setting year.
