Apple: Record-Breaking Holiday Season for the App Store

Apple press release:

In the two weeks ending January 3, customers spent over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases, setting back-to-back weekly records for traffic and purchases. January 1, 2016 marked the biggest day in App Store history with customers spending over $144 million. It broke the previous single-day record set just a week earlier on Christmas Day. […]

Worldwide, the App Store has brought in nearly $40 billion for developers since 2008, with over one-third generated in the last year alone.

I’m really curious how that figure breaks down across app categories. I can’t help but suspect a huge chunk of it is in-app consumables for games.

Largely as a result of the App Store’s success, Apple is now responsible for creating and supporting 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone. Nearly three-quarters of those jobs — over 1.4 million — are attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the app economy.*

That asterisk at the end is a footnote pointing to the source for this claim: “App Economy Jobs in the United States”, a paper by Michael Mandel published today by the Progressive Policy Institute.

★ Wednesday, 6 January 2016