Apple's iOS developer payouts eclipse $8B, up $1B in a month

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has now paid more than $8 billion to its iOS developer partners, a $1 billion increase since the company last trumpeted App Store sales a month earlier and up from $6.5 billion in Oct. 2012.

"We've built an ecosystem that is the best in customer experience on the planet," said Apple CEO Tim Cook during an appearance Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. "In addition, it's fueling an incredible economic gain for developers. And so we've already gone over paying $8 billion now to developers. If you look back at the app economy of the PC market, or look at it today, there's money flowing to two or three people, but you don't see a large number of people doing PC apps. I mean, I challenge you to find any, except the usual suspects now. The money's all moved--the innovation has all moved to tablets and smartphones. And so I see momentum, I see an ecosystem."

Apple announced iOS developer payouts of $7 billion in early January, singling out gaming startups Backflip Studios and Supercell, which have raked in more than $100 million combined for their respective freemium titles DragonVale and Clash of Clans. At that time, Apple said consumers have downloaded more than 40 billion iOS applications from the App Store, including close to 20 billion in 2012 alone and a record-high 2 billion during the month of December. The $1 billion developer payouts jump between January and February likely signals an influx of new App Store shoppers looking to populate iPhones and iPads acquired as holiday gifts; Cook did not update App Store download totals Tuesday, however.

The App Store now features more than 775,000 iOS apps in all. Cook's Goldman Sachs presentation cited the growing volume of apps optimized for the iPad as an example of Apple's lead in the tablets race: "The iPad is absolutely the poster child of the post-PC revolution," he said. "If you look at what we bring there, we've worked really hard on our ecosystem. There are over 300,000 apps that have been custom-made to take advantage of the big beautiful canvas that iPad has. The other guys have a few hundred. We have a significant lead in this area."

For more:
- read this Macworld transcript
- read this Next Web article

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