Microsoft isn’t the only company eager to share ground breaking statistics; Apple have announced that this past holiday season was record breaking when it came to the Apple App Store.
How record breaking? $1.1 billion dollars is the tune being sung by the Cupertino based company. The amount was spent by customers over the two weeks prior to January 4th, setting back to back weekly records for the amount of traffic driven to the App Store and the subsequent purchases made. New Year’s Day, January 1st, proved to be the most lucrative day for Apple and for app developers as over $144 million was spent, the largest amount ever spent on the App Store in a single day since its inception. This comes less than a week after the same record was set on Christmas Day.
“The App Store had a holiday season for the record books. We are excited that our customers downloaded and enjoyed so many incredible apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, spending over $20 billion on the App Store last year alone. We’re grateful to all the developers who have created the most innovative and exciting apps in the world for our customers. We can’t wait for what’s to come in 2016.”
– Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
So far the App Store has generated nearly $40 billion for app developers since its creation in 2008; one-third of that amount, $13.3 billion, was made in 2015 alone. $40 billion is a significant amount, as a result Apple is now responsible, through the App Store, for providing over 1.9 million jobs in the United States alone. Three-quarters of those jobs are attributed to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs who spend their days populating the App Store with apps, some great, some bad. Also part of that figure is non-IT jobs that are supported or exist due to the app economy.
Outside of the U.S, Apple has reported that the iOS app economy has created 1.2 million jobs in Europe and 1.4 million jobs in China.
As for what the average Joe spent their money on, gaming, social and entertainment apps proved to be the most popular of the App Store categories. Also driving sales were Apple TV and the Apple Watch, with their respective popular apps being HBO Now, Beat Sports and Rayman adventures for the Apple TV, and Nike+ Running, iTranslate and Citymapper for the Apple Watch.
