A year ago, Apple boasted of a record-breaking holiday season for its iTunes App Store, and proudly revealed that January 1, 2016 was its busiest day ever, with $144 million of app and in-app purchases on that one day.
Today, the company said that New Year"s Day this year had completely shattered that record; on January 1, 2017, the App Store racked up a staggering $240 million in purchases - an increase of 66% year-over-year.
"Since the App Store launched in 2008," Apple said, "developers have earned over $60 billion, creating amazing app experiences for App Store customers across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac." It also pointed out that last year alone, "developers earned over $20 billion, up over 40 percent from 2015."
Throughout December, over $3 billion of purchases were made from the App Store, making it the most successful holiday season in the store"s history. Nintendo"s new Super Mario Run mobile game was the most downloaded app worldwide on both Christmas Day and New Year"s Day, as well as being one of the top 10 most downloaded apps across the entire year, despite having only been released in mid-December.
Apple said that the App Store now has over 2.2 million apps, an increase of more than 20% compared with a year ago, despite the company"s decision to remove "problematic and abandoned" apps from the store in September.
Source: Apple