1 Million+ Apps Later, Apple Says Developers Have Made $13 Billion On Its Platform

The iOS App Store now has over a million apps, which have been downloaded 60 billion times. The news broke this morning at the Apple event taking place at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, when CEO Tim Cook took the stage, prefacing the day’s announcements with a recap of the traction Apple is seeing with the new iPhones and iOS 7 adoption. And as always, he gave a shout out to the developer community with an update on how much Apple has paid out. That number? Today, it’s $13 billion dollars, says Cook.

The 1 million app milestone was just around the corner, we suspected. At this year’s WWDC in June, Apple announced there were 900,000 apps available on its platform, which had been download 50 billion times. At the time, the company also noted it had paid developers $10 billion.

For comparison’s sake, in June 2012, Apple said there were 650,000 iOS applications, which was up from 425,000 iOS apps in 2011. The company paid developers $5 billion in 2012, $2.5 billion in 2011 and $1.5 billion in 2010, to give you a sense of the App Store’s impact on developers’ wallets in years past.

Those developer payouts are impressive, of course, but the popularity and massive size of the App Store in recent months has turned into something of a double-edged sword. It’s far more difficult to get ranked on the App Store’s top charts these days, where only 2 percent of the top iPhone publishers in the U.S. are newcomers, studies have found. Apple has been refining its algorithms to even the playing field somewhat and to prevent the store’s charts from being gamed, but the results of those changes haven’t yet benefitted the smaller to medium-sized developers yet.