The Apple App Store It’s already a $1.1 trillion-a-year economy, according to an independent study conducted by the Analysis Group. The figure is made up of 910,000 million dollars corresponding to billing and sales for the commercialization of physical goods and services. 109,000 million dollars in advertising within the apps. Finally, 104,000 million dollars for digital goods and services.
According to the report, one of the main growth factors of the App Store ecosystem is the recovery in demand from sectors such as travel, which obtained an increase of 84%. VTCs also contributed to the increase in numbers with 45% more sales.
Analysis Group also highlights growth in in-app ad spend in categories like social media and retail. In addition, the sale of food and supermarket orders are among the categories with the highest increase in sales, with increases of more than double and triple, respectively.
Finally, entertainment apps have experienced quite healthy growth within the App Store and social platforms focused on content creators such as TikTok or Instagram.
Growth of the app economy in the Apple App Store
According to the Analysis Group study, the year-on-year growth of the app economy in the App Store is:
- 27% between 2019 and 2020
- 27% between 2020 and 2021
- 29% between 2021 and 2022
It also ensures that small and medium developers experienced growth of 71% between 2021 and 2022, above large companies present in the App Store. Since 2019, the increase in sales and developer billing is 80%. In Europe, specifically, the increase is above average, standing at 116%.
The Apple App Store celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2023. Launched in 2008 along with the iPhone 3G, it is a safe way to download applications without fear of installing viruses or software that can violate people’s privacy. According to Analysis, throughout this decade and a half, iOS developers have earned more than $320 billion.
But the App Store has expanded to other Apple platforms: it’s now also available on iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. In all cases they offer a similar experience, with a single point of search, download and purchase of applications.
According to Manzana, throughout 2022 fraudulent transactions worth more than 2,000 million dollars were blocked. They also rejected a total of 1,700,000 apps for failing to meet privacy, security and/or quality requirements. It is likely that during WWDC it will be announced that the company will allow alternative app stores.