Apple Services: Right on Cue

On January 12, Eddie Cue dropped a few significant digits on us:

The App Store alone saw over 850 million average weekly users globally. Developers earned over $550 billion on Apple platform since 2008.

Apple Pay eliminated well over $1 billion in fraud, while generating more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales globally. Purchases made through Apple Pay significantly outpaced the overall growth in consumer spending levels during the peak holiday shopping period in November and December. Apple Pay is now available in 89 markets. with more than 11,000 banks and network partners — including more than 20 local payment networks. Tap to Pay on iPhone expanded to 34 additional markets — now covering most of Europe — and is live in a total of 50 markets, with more than 15 million merchants of all sizes across the world accepting contactless payments using just an iPhone

Apple TV eclipsed all prior viewership records in December 2025, with 36% increase in monthly engagement (total hours viewed). To date, Apple TV has amassed 672 award wins and 3,085 nominations (excluding 2026).

Apple Music reached all-time highs in both listenership and new subscribers.

Apple Fitness+ expanding to 28 additional countries and regions offering more than 8,000 workouts and meditations in 4K Ultra HD.

In 2025, Shazam generated over 1 billion recognitions per month.

Expanded Share Item Location feature in Find My to 27 additional airlines, bringing the total to 36. (This feature allows private and secure sharing of an AirTag’s or Find My network accessory’s location with an airline’s customer service, reducing “truly lost” or unrecoverable luggage by 90 percent)

Apple Podcasts expanded transcripts to over 125 million episodes in 13 languages.

Apple News solidified its position as the No. 1 news app in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and No. 2 in the UK. News features over 3,000 publications and more than 600 titles with Apple News+. News+ expanded its offerings with the debut of Apple News+ Food, which includes 100,000 recipes from 60 publications in the U.S., the UK, Australia, and English-speaking Canada. Apple News now includes over 150 local newspapers and news feeds across 50 U.S. states, seven Canadian markets, and London.

Apple One Individual and Family plans are available in more than 100 markets world-wide, with Apple One Premier, which also includes Apple Fitness+, available in more than 20 markets.

Historic data is not available on most of these singular data points however they are available at least for the payments to developers. In fact, there are 26 such data points. They are shown in the graph below as the blue dots.

The green dots and curve fitting them is my estimation of the total billings for App Store. That is, the total spent by customers on the App Store. To date, that amount is over three quarters of a trillion dollars. ($733 billion to be precise.)

Note that the data can be represented by a third order polynomial. Furthermore, since the r-squared is 0.9999, the function is very predictive. As an exercise, using this analysis it can be determined that $1 trillion will be achieved by the first quarter of 2028.

The beauty of a polynomial growth rate is that the rate of payment, that is the amount paid on a monthly basis, is itself accelerating. The following graph shows the payment rate in $million/day for developers.

This growth suggests that quite soon we will be nearing a rate of $300 million/day or $100 billion per year developer payment rate.

This is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. As Eddie Cue points out in the press release,

In 2024, the App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales, with more than 90 percent of that commerce going directly to developers, with zero commission paid to Apple.

To understand the totality of transactions on Apple platforms we need to explore the entirety of the App economy. There is for another post. Stay tuned.