Apple says its App Retailer helped generate $1.3T in billings and gross sales, most with no fee
Forward of its Worldwide Developer Convention on June 9, Apple on Thursday supplied a brand new replace on its world App Retailer enterprise, sharing that builders generated $1.3 trillion in billings and gross sales in 2024. The corporate pressured that 90% of these billings and gross sales didn’t contain paying Apple a fee.
The research additionally famous that developer billings and gross sales for digital items and providers in 2024 totaled $131 billion, pushed by cellular video games, photograph and video modifying apps, and different enterprise instruments. Bodily items and providers, in the meantime, topped $1 trillion, due to elevated demand for on-line meals supply and pickup, and on-line grocery apps.
In-app promoting income was $150 billion final yr.
Spending throughout digital items and providers, bodily items and providers, and in-app promoting has greater than doubled since 2019, with bodily items and providers seeing the strongest development at greater than 2.6 occasions, Apple mentioned.
The numbers are meant to focus on how the App Retailer creates monetary alternatives for cellular builders that stretch past gross sales from in-app purchases. The storefront gives a spot for builders to have their apps found by shoppers, and Apple gives the technical infrastructure required to run an app enterprise.
This place ignores the truth that the App Retailer is now a mature ecosystem, and apps are a promoting level for the iPhone itself. Builders at present have quite a few instruments at their disposal to host, distribute, and handle their very own functions, in the event that they select, however Apple’s insurance policies stop this.
That’s beginning to change, nevertheless. In a latest court docket ruling in favor of Epic Video games within the U.S., Apple was required to let builders hyperlink to their very own web sites for processing in-app purchases with out having to pay Apple a fee. In Europe, the tech large is preventing towards the principles proposed by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which, amongst different issues, directs Apple to present builders the precise to tell their clients about different fee mechanisms.
The brand new knowledge comes from an Apple-funded research by economists Professor Andrey Fradkin from the Boston College Questrom Faculty of Enterprise, and Dr. Jessica Burley from Evaluation Group. The latter has been working with Apple for years all through its antitrust authorized battles to doc the App Retailer’s success in a extra constructive gentle for the corporate.
The research highlights different regional development tendencies, like how the billings and gross sales facilitated by the App Retailer greater than doubled over the previous 5 years within the U.S., China and Europe. Digital fee spending, in the meantime, additionally grew by greater than 7 occasions within the U.S. since 2019, due to the broad adoption of cellular funds.
The report additionally reiterated different metrics, like how the App Retailer attracts 813 million common weekly guests worldwide, and pointed to the varied investments Apple has made in instruments and applied sciences to help builders, like coding and distribution platforms, frameworks, analytics, anti-fraud methods, developer help, and extra.