Whatever else we hear from Apple’s earnings call later today, we know that its App Store game is strong.
The virtual store that provides all of your favorite fart apps raked in a Scrooge McDuck-esque pile of coin with a record-setting $3.3 billion in revenue and 5.5 billion downloads during the last three months of 2015.
Apple wasn’t the only company that finished the year strong, though; Facebook also pulled in some impressive numbers.
The info comes courtesy of app analytics company Sensor Tower, and the full report is available on its blog.
These App Store numbers represent all-time quarterly records for the folks in Cupertino. But the whole year looked pretty good and showed significant growth over the same time periods last year:
Photo: Sensor Tower
And if you’re curious about where all that business went, it was a pretty good time to be Facebook. The social-media giant owned three of the five most downloaded apps both in the U.S. and worldwide, with Messenger grabbing the top spot over the core app and Instagram doing pretty well on its own. We thought it was kind of annoying that the company would spin off its chat functions into its own download, but it looks like that was the right call. Especially since it means you can talk to your friends without murdering your iPhone’s battery.
Unsurprisingly, games were the most downloaded category, scoring more downloads than Entertainment and Photo & Video apps combined across the entire year. Even less surprisingly, titans Game of War: Fire Age and Clash of Clans made the most money of all, hauling in more than $120 million each despite their continuing problems of having among the most boring titles conceived by humankind.
Spotify was the highest grossing non-game of the quarter, but since Sensor Tower’s data do not include Apple-created apps, we’ll have to go somewhere else to see how it fared against Apple Music.
This report sounds like pretty good news considering the gloomy rumors we’ve heard about Apple’s iPhone business slowing down. If the App Store continues to pull in so much money, it could help take some of the sting away if the smartphone market hits a dry patch.
We’re not done with numbers for the day, however. Apple’s about to make its own earnings report, and we’re liveblogging it so that you can get all of the amazing financials in real time.
