Appy Birthday: Apple’s App Store turns 10!

Who would have thought something so simple would become something we probably couldn’t live without.

Apple’s App Store has just turned 10 years old and having started with just 500 apps has grown to over 2.2million and created a world of education and entertainment that not even Steve Jobs could have forseen.

How’ this for numbers;

• Developers have earned over $100 BILLION.  Yep, Billion.
• That means Apple has made abour $40 Billion – because they take around 30% of all purchases.
• Apps have been downloaded over 180 billion times.
• App Store is available in 155 countries.
• There are 20 million Apple developers in the world
• Tens of millions of jobs have been created in the App economy
• Every week there are 500 million visitors to the App Store

The biggest number though, and the one that really matters to developers out there – there are 1.3 BILLION Active Apple devices in the world.

There was a report done by the Progressive Policy Institute looking at the App Economy last year, and it found  “As of March 2017, we estimate that the Australian App Economy totals 113,000 jobs and has increased by 11 percent since 2014.

“The iPhone and the App Store were the beginnings of a global App Economy: an army of app developers writing mobile applications for billions of users.”

“The App Economy has unleashed an important source of employment and economic growth in Australia.”

“Any app is exportable, in the sense that it can be downloaded from an app store by anybody around the world, which means the Australian App Economy can become a basis for continued growth.”

Here in Australia there’s been some amazing international success stories too.  Fruit Ninja took the world by storm early on, Crossy Road in more recent years, while in the utility space apps like Canva for design, Pocketbook for controlling your expenses and Invoice2Go for small business invoicing are just a few great Aussie success stories to come from this 10 year period.