Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 09:10 pm

Apple has now paid $4 billion to App Store developers

By Daniel Eran Dilger

The value of Apple's platforms is reflected in the amount of revenue the company's App Stores pays its developers, a figure that has now hit $4 billion.

Apple first announced having paid out over $1 billion to developers in June 2010, after just over two years of App Store sales involving over five billion app downloads.

Last summer, the amount paid to developers had jumped to 2.5 billion, more than doubling in both size and pace in just one year.

Four months later in October at the iPhone 4S launch, Apple stated it had sold 250 million iOS devices and that the App Store had seen a total of 18 billion downloads, paying out over $3 billion to developers.

Apple has now reached $700,000 in payments to developers in just a quarter, pushing its cumulative payouts to developers above $4 billion.

Google recently reported matching Apple's milestone of 250,000 mobile device sales across all of its Android licensees, but Apple has upped its number above 315 million iOS devices, due to sales of 67.87 million iOS products in the holiday quarter.

In December, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt predicted that mobile developers would "prioritize" Android development over iOS in the first half of 2012, stating that "ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking."

Commercial developers in general appear to be more interested in revenue than volume distribution of their code, but Google itself has pursued a strategy that favors volume over revenue, giving away its software in hopes of establishing a broad advertising platform.

Last October, Google reported a mobile revenues "run rate" approaching $2.5 billion annually, with much of that revenue coming from iOS devices, not just Android. Apple's $13.06 billion in profits for the holiday quarter was greater than Google's entire revenue of $10.6 billion.

One year ago, Google's Android platform manager Eric Chu said that his company was "not happy" about the limited number of apps actually being purchased by Android users, and described plans to turn those figures around.