Apple said Wednesday a new independent study found App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales last year as part of the system’s robust year-over-year growth of 29%.
More than 90 percent of the money went to developers, without any commission paid to Apple, the company said.
Apple has announced several tax changes for the App Store that go into effect starting May 31. The new rules will affect app developers in Ghana, Lithuania, Moldova, Brazil and Spain.
In Spain and Ghana, taxes on the proceeds earned from apps and games have increased. While in Lithuania and Moldova, the VAT rate on e-books and audiobooks has gone down.
Keeping bad applications out of the App Store is a monumental task — Apple says it denied 1.7 million apps submitted for approval in 2022. That’s out of 6.1 million, and it’s an increase from the previous year.
And Apple also blocked nearly 3.9 million stolen credit cards from being used to make fraudulent purchases on the App Store. Plus, the iPhone-maker blocked millions of fake reviews.
Small developers around the world saw revenue from Apple’s App Store grow 71% between 2020 and 2022, according to researchers.
Revenue growth over that span for small devs in the United States was even higher: 83%.
Apple reports that the App Store is has a problem that might prevent users from buying applications. That includes the iOS and Mac App Stores. And the same issue could affect attempts to buy ebooks.
A similar problem is causing problems with buying subscriptions.
UPDATE: Fixed after about 14 hours.
April 23, 2009: Less than a year after opening its virtual doors, the App Store reaches 1 billion downloads.
Peer-to-peer file sharing app Bump becomes the 1 billionth app to be downloaded. As a result of his purchase, 13-year-old Connor Mulcahey of Weston, Connecticut, wins a “1 Billion App Countdown” promotion.
He takes home an assortment of Apple products valued at more than $13,000, including a $10,000 iTunes gift card, a 32GB iPod touch, a Time Capsule and a 17-inch MacBook Pro.
5 Movies, likely the first iPhone app generated almost entirely by ChatGPT, was approved by Apple and published on the App Store late Thursday night.
Morten Just, an independent developer of Mac apps who’s based in Switzerland, guided ChatGPT through the creation of the movie-recommendation app. Just said he told the AI what he wanted, then pasted its output into an Xcode project, writing only an estimated 2% to 5% of the code himself. The chatbot even fixed bugs as Just pasted in error messages.
“What matters to me is creating software that is useful and solves real problems,” Just told Cult of Mac after his 5 Movies app went live. “If I can do that faster with AI, I will.”
The Federal Trade Commission wants to make cancelling subscriptions as simple as starting them. The US government agency proposed a “click to cancel” rule that would make it easy for consumers to escape recurring subscriptions and memberships.
Apple users can easily leave subscriptions they signed up for thorough the App Store. That’s not necessarily true for ones started elsewhere.
How do you reinstall Apple apps like Music, Podcasts, Weather, Maps and Find My onto your iPhone or iPad? If you can’t find them, it’s possible you uninstalled them and your device needs to download them again. Or they might have simply disappeared from your Home Screen, and are now hiding in the App Library.
There are also a few iPhone apps that Apple hasn’t made available on iPad. This was the case with Weather until very recently, so you may need to install an update to get it.
I’ll walk you through all the possibilities, showing you how to get Apple’s stock apps back on your iPhone or iPad.
March 6, 2008: Apple releases the iPhone software development kit, finally allowing devs to start creating native mobile apps for the new smartphone.
When the App Store eventually opens a few months later, a new industry springs up overnight. Third-party devs rush to take advantage of Apple’s lucrative distribution network.
