Apple’s iOS ecosystem keeps on rolling. The company said it has more than 600,000 apps in the store, up from the 550,000 number they confirmed a month ago.
On top of that the iTunes store generated $1.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year. Apple didn’t break out how much of that was devoted to songs versus apps. They also didn’t update the recent 25 billion app downloads figure they also shared last month. Just to look back at previous stats the company has shared, Apple said it has paid out more than $4 billion to developers cumulatively. Google’s store in contrast has at least 450,000 apps and it still lags in monetization (although it’s improving!)
I regularly talk to top-grossing developers too, so I have an anecdotal barometer of revenues per day. Last summer and fall, revenue for a top-grossing app hovered at around $3 million per month. Then Epic’s Infinity Blade II proved that a single iOS app could do $5 million in a month in December, the very lucrative holiday month. After surveying developers who have held the top grossing iPhone rank, I’m hearing that the slot is doing about $250,000 to $300,000 in revenue per day now, including both in-app purchase and advertising revenue.
Here’s a look back how the ecosystem has grown since the store’s launch almost four years ago in mid-2008:
