In 2014, developers earned $15 billion on the App Store, $4.5 billion went to Apple

via: PingWest

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Apple seems very satisfied with the performance of the App Store in the past year. On its official website, Apple announced that developers earned $15 billion through the App Store in the past 12 months. According to the 30% profit sharing rule, Apple received $4.5 billion of the revenue, which is a significant increase of 50% compared to 2013.

This upward trend continued into 2015. In the first week of January, Apple users spent $500 million on app purchases or in-app purchases on the App Store, setting a new record. At the same time, New Year’s Day 2015 also became the day with the highest revenue for the App Store.

In 2014, Apple's App Store also saw some new changes. The iOS 8 App Store added a bundled app sales method and provided app preview videos. The App Store also introduced new features for developers, including TestFlight, a testing tool for testing pre-released apps, an expanded children's category (including apps developed specifically for children under 12 years old), and Apple Pay, which makes secure payments easier.

At the same time, in China, the App Store began to provide China UnionPay payment services, and Chinese Apple users can directly use savings cards or credit cards with the UnionPay logo to pay. In addition, in November 2014, Apple announced that RMB 1 and RMB 3 would be the new pricing for the Chinese App Store as a permanent price option, which was previously only a promotional price.

Of course, compared to an iPhone that costs more than 5,000 yuan, an app priced at 1 yuan must be purchased 5,000 times to equal the revenue from selling an iPhone. The App Store's annual revenue of $4.5 billion is only a small part of Apple's annual revenue of $180 billion, so the value of the data is not that obvious. However, the considerable income that the App Store brings to developers and the large number of high-quality applications that iOS users can obtain are of great significance to the entire Apple ecosystem, and these are not hidden from the data.

Moreover, a large part of the App Store revenue is directly converted into profits, and this figure is growing by 50% every year. It can be expected that the App Store business will contribute more and more to Apple's profits. As of September 2014, Apple's profit for the quarter was $8.5 billion.

Compared to Google Play, which has more users and more apps, the App Store provides 1.4 million apps for download, while Google Play has 1.72 million apps. However, the revenue generated by Apple's App Store is more lucrative. According to data tracked by App Annie, in the third quarter of 2014, the revenue generated by Apple's App Store was 60% higher than that generated by Google Play.

In the future, Apple's high-quality users will make the App Store business revenue higher and higher, account for an increasingly larger proportion of revenue, and contribute more and more to profits.

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