Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google Play are two of the largest mobile app stores available at the moment, but how much money are they raking in? While we’re not sure how much Google is making, a report from The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Apple’s App Store in 2015 actually made $20 billion in sales.
With Apple taking a 30% cut, this roughly translates to $6 billion that went to Apple alone. This sounds like a massive number, doesn’t it? However it seems that despite the huge figure, it has been reported that growth is actually slowing down as those numbers could apparently have been much higher, or at least that’s what analysts had predicted.
The $20 billion worth of sales is said to represent a 43% year-over-year growth in revenue, but this is actually a decline from 2013-2014 where the App Store’s year-over-year growth was at 50%. This is despite the fact that in 2015, Apple introduced new products like the Apple Watch and the new Apple TV.
Of course it is possible that this might be a slump and things could pick up for 2016. Alternatively it would just seem to suggest that maybe the app market has matured and that people are just sticking to apps that they already know and are used to.