Ever wondered how much revenue Apple makes from its nearly fabled app store? Well, you no longer need to bother to make a guess about that. Philip Schiller, Head of Product Marketing at Apple has recently revealed that the company paid $2.5 billion to mobile application developers who sold their apps via the app store within the time period between July 2008 and July 2011. Since the company maintains a 30%-70% revenue sharing policy with app developers, it is clear that Apple got to make somewhere around the $1.1 billion mark during the period.
Besides, the quarterly reports issued by Apple show that the profits made by the smartphone giant has been growing at the rate of nearly 23% every quarter. In fact, the revenue that the company earned in Q1 of 2011 amounted to $1.6 billion. This is higher than the $1.3 billion that Apple made on the same quarter, one year ago. This makes Apple the biggest grosser among companies that have their own mobile app development platforms, at least for the time being.
The sales figures of Apple's App Store were also, not surprisingly, astounding. According to a statement made by a spokesperson from Apple, the company has sold around 15 billion apps (cumulatively, for iPhone and iPad) over the three year period from July 2008 to July 2011. Philip Schiller added that the company presently has more than 425,000 apps available for download in its App Store. These include the apps that were exclusively developed for the iPad.
So, is there no other brand out there that can pose the slightest threat to Apple? It certainly seems like that, at least at the moment. Even the company's greatest competitor, Google, has posted download figures of Android apps at 4.5 billion, since the store was launched a couple years ago. The search engine giant turned smartphone OS developer also commented that there were more than 200,000 apps in the Android store. However, the revenue Google earns from their app store will always be lower than Apple, since they have a lot more free apps than the latter.