Apple celebrates monumental 2016 App Store growth, $240M on New Years Day alone

Apple on Thursday announced that the App Store's biggest single day yet was on New Years Day, capping a year that saw Apple pay out $20 billion to developers in 2016 alone.

In a release today, Apple noted that on New Years's Day, customers purchased nearly $240 million in apps and in-app purchases. December alone gathered $3 billion in sales.

"2016 was a record-shattering year for the App Store, generating $20 billion for developers, and 2017 is off to a great start with January 1 as the single biggest day ever on the App Store," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "We want to thank our entire developer community for the many innovative apps they have created — which together with our products — help to truly enrich people's lives."

Apple's highlights include Nintendo's "Super Mario Run" hitting 40 million downloads just four days after its release, with the title also the #1 download globally on Christmas Day. Analysts predict that the game has seen only 90 million downloads, with a 3 percent attach rate for the $10 in-app purchase that unlocks the game, but Apple says that some "wrong assumptions" have been made regarding those totals.

Apple also noted that since the App Store's launch, developers have earned over $60 billion, spanning the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac ecosystems. The app store now offers 2.2 million apps in total, up over 20 percent from last year, even after the Apple clean-up of abandoned apps in 2016.

According to Apple, the App Store's subscription billings grew significantly in 2016 to $2.7 billion, up 74 percent from 2015.

7 Comments

rob53 3307 comments · 13 Years

About 7 years ago

And how much are Android developers getting and I wonder if Google pays them anything.

Of course Apple is dead, everyone knows that, or at least all those phony analysts do. /s

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

Would like to know how much was paid by Google Play to developers in the last year or so. Would the contrast be too embarrassing for Google?

ericthehalfbee 4489 comments · 13 Years

lkrupp said:

Would like to know how much was paid by Google Play to developers in the last year or so. Would the contrast be too embarrassing for Google?

Of course Google won't release those numbers. Just like Samsung and Galaxy S/Note Sales, it wouldn't look good to confirm just how far behind they are.

steven n. 1229 comments · 13 Years

lkrupp said:

Would like to know how much was paid by Google Play to developers in the last year or so. Would the contrast be too embarrassing for Google?

Most data shows, on average, Android pulls in about 35-50% of iOS so Android is doing much better than it was 3-4 years ago. At that point, it was about 20-30% and the sad state of Android meant development effort was about 2-3X. So you had 70% of your staff working for 20% of your revenue. Google has mostly straightened out their development issues so Android is only slightly more painful than iOS to develop on. This is on the average. There are flyers showing just the opposite.

foggyhill 4767 comments · 10 Years

steven n. said:

lkrupp said:

Would like to know how much was paid by Google Play to developers in the last year or so. Would the contrast be too embarrassing for Google?

Most data shows, on average, Android pulls in about 35-50% of iOS so Android is doing much better than it was 3-4 years ago. At that point, it was about 20-30% and the sad state of Android meant development effort was about 2-3X. So you had 70% of your staff working for 20% of your revenue. Google has mostly straightened out their development issues so Android is only slightly more painful than iOS to develop on. This is on the average. There are flyers showing just the opposite.

35% to 50% is one hell of a margin of error. I'm betting on the low end myself from my own experience with this industry.

Considering that Android has 85% of the market and its immense fragmentation, money coming to the individual developers outside a few key apps must be pretty terrible.

A Developer makes 6-8% per potential Android user of what an IOS devs makes.

The main dev issue with Android is the ridiculous fragmentation; this is not an issue that can be resolved by any tool.
It is not getting better at all. This also has led to most devs not targetting new APIS in Android.

So, significantly higher costs because of this fragmentation, or having to target a particular segment (probably the flagship one to high mid range), which also limits market size.

As for Android tablets... Well, forget about it, they're almost all cheap and used for content consumption (not even gaming).