Yesterday Apple announced their financial results for the fiscal quarter running from October to December, 2012. The short version is that they shocked the world with record breaking revenue, profits and volume. That is all well and good for Apple, but I thought it would be interesting to boil down the numbers into the parts that actually affect individual developers.
The highlights for iOS developers are:
- 37M iPhones sold. The average selling price of these was around $660 which means that most of these are the newer 4S rather than iPhone 4 or 3GS.
- 15.4M iPad sold. That brings the total volume sold since 2010 to around 55M.
- ~9.5M iPod touch sold. This value is reverse engineered from various bits of data.
- 62M iOS devices where sold. This value brings the total to date up to 315M. As of writing this means that they are more cumulative iOS devices sold that there are people living in the United States (only 313M people.)
- 85M users have signed up for iCloud, which is pretty remarkable given that it has only been available for a few months. For some context, Google+ has 90M users.
- Apple paid out $700M to developers during this quarter. That is equivalent to 125 $0.99 apps being sold every second.
A few crazy comparisons:
- If you add up the combined resolutions of all iOS devices sold in this quarter you get 40,747,941,888,000 pixels. It takes 17 viewings of entire Star Wars Saga on Blu Ray to see that many pixels. (805 minutes x 24 fps x 1080p)
- If you combine the physical area of the screens on those iOS devices you end up with 156 acres of glass. Which is bigger than the Vatican (110 acres).
- 7.8 iOS devices were sold every second. Nearly double the roughly 4/sec global birth rate.
Bottom line
As an iOS developer this is all fantastic news. Like I said last week the single most important thing that Apple does for its developers is continue to grow our customer base. During this quarter 62M new devices were sold that can run the apps I make. These customers are then buying apps, putting $88 in developer pockets every second.
There has never been a marketplace like the App Store, it is the best place to be right now.