Apple boasted about those 15 billion downloads registered by the App Store in 3 years of life, but also with the 2.5 billion dollars paid to developers over time. The 2.5 billion dollars represent only 70% of the total receipts recorded of the App Store, so the remaining 30% belongs to Apple, right? Not really, from the 30 percent, Apple takes only 13 while 16 goes to the companies that process the payments and one percent goes to the costs of maintaining the servers that support the App Store infrastructure.
Analyst Gene Munster made a calculation regarding the profit collected by Apple in the 3 years since the App Store existed. He calculated everything at an average price of $1.44 for each application and at this price Apple's profit means only $0.18. Basically, those 1.44 dollars are divided like this:
- 70% – $1.01 to developers;
- 13% – $0.18 to Apple;
- 16% – $0.23 to companies that process payments;
- 1% - $0.02 goes to the fund from which the ecosystem that supports the App Store infrastructure is paid.
According to Gene Munster, Apple earned 538 million dollars in 3 years of the App Store, but 246 million were spent on infrastructure maintenance, so Apple was left with a profit of 292 million dollars after 3 years of the App Store. I assume that this figure seems small compared to the billions earned by Apple from the sale of iDevices, right? Well, it seems to me to be a small number, but if we think that the App Store is one of the main reasons why people buy iDevices, then we can conclude that Apple comes out "more profitable" from this whole process.
