Apple has doled out $120 billion to app developers worldwide in 11 years
In the 11 years since Apple first opened the App Store, developers worldwide have received over $120 billion, with European developers collecting just over $25 billion of that.
Detail from the iOS App Store
Apple's Vice President of Apple Music and International Sales, Oliver Schusser, revealed the payouts on Thursday. He revealed the figures in a statement first reported by German site Macerkopf and which also included some details of the company's ambitions with both App Stores and its various services.
Schusser said, translated from German, that "our services, which include content stores, Apple Pay and iCloud Storage, are targeting $40 billion in annual sales."
This means that European app creators have earned 20.83 percent of the total revenue from the App Stores and that percentage is a significant decrease since previous reports. Back in 2014, Apple announced worldwide developer revenues were $20 billion and that European ones had then earned $6.5 billion or 32.5 percent.
Apple revealed that there are 650,000 active podcast
In the same statement, Schusser confirmed previous reports of how many subscribers Apple Music has, and trumpeted new figures for podcast listening too.
"Since its launch nearly four years ago, Apple Music now has 50 million paying users around the world," he said in the translated statement. "We are the leading music streaming service in the US and the world's leading music service on the iPhone. The last update I want to release today is Podcasting, where our customers downloaded and streamed over 50 billion episodes of 650,000 active shows on Apple Podcasts."
Oliver Schusser was promoted to Vice President of Apple Music and International Sales in April 2018, around the same time that Jimmy Iovine announced his own move into a consulting role. Schusser is believed to have been instrumental in Apple's purchasing of Shazam and to now be overseeing label deals and exclusives for the Apple Music platform.
Detail from the iOS App Store
Apple's Vice President of Apple Music and International Sales, Oliver Schusser, revealed the payouts on Thursday. He revealed the figures in a statement first reported by German site Macerkopf and which also included some details of the company's ambitions with both App Stores and its various services.
Schusser said, translated from German, that "our services, which include content stores, Apple Pay and iCloud Storage, are targeting $40 billion in annual sales."
This means that European app creators have earned 20.83 percent of the total revenue from the App Stores and that percentage is a significant decrease since previous reports. Back in 2014, Apple announced worldwide developer revenues were $20 billion and that European ones had then earned $6.5 billion or 32.5 percent.
Apple revealed that there are 650,000 active podcast
In the same statement, Schusser confirmed previous reports of how many subscribers Apple Music has, and trumpeted new figures for podcast listening too.
"Since its launch nearly four years ago, Apple Music now has 50 million paying users around the world," he said in the translated statement. "We are the leading music streaming service in the US and the world's leading music service on the iPhone. The last update I want to release today is Podcasting, where our customers downloaded and streamed over 50 billion episodes of 650,000 active shows on Apple Podcasts."
Oliver Schusser was promoted to Vice President of Apple Music and International Sales in April 2018, around the same time that Jimmy Iovine announced his own move into a consulting role. Schusser is believed to have been instrumental in Apple's purchasing of Shazam and to now be overseeing label deals and exclusives for the Apple Music platform.
Comments
The App Store may be the single greatest development in personal computing in the 21st Century, but it's a two way street. An App Store is only successful if it's stocked with compelling stuff from creative developers. Apple has certainly made it easier for developers to reach a wider audience, but devs managed to generate revenue before the existence of the App Store, and many still do without it.
Are developers successful because of the App Store or is the App Store successful because of developers?
Apple gives them a market to develop for. It delivers that market to developers in a way that makes it much easier for most of them to monetize their work (or, for those who rely on other revenue streams, makes it easier to grow or maintain those revenue streams). On the other side, developers create more and more utility for Apple products and thus help sell them.
Apple is distributing to developers their shares of the proceeds from the sales of (or other transactions relating to) their apps. Apple acts as the agent for those sales. It collects the payments, keeps its own shares, and then distributes the remaining proceeds to the developers. Dole out means something like distribute. That terminology seems fine to me.
Dictionary result for dole
Old English dāl ‘division, portion, or share’, of Germanic origin; related to deal1. The sense ‘distribution of charitable gifts’ dates from Middle English; the sense ‘unemployment benefit’ dates from the early 20th century.
So a customer who pays for a pro app is now not entitled to a refund if the app was deceptively or improperly advertised? That’s BS and amounts to a very un-Apple experience. I’m furious at Apple for doing this.
That second definition of dole (the one defining it as a verb, as it is used here) is consistent with the usage here: distribute shares of something; synonym - disburse.
Not every definition of a word has to be consistent with a given usage in order for that usage to be proper.
Also:
dole out: To distribute something, either physically or verbally.
dole out: to give out (something) to appropriate individuals
That second definition of dole (the one defining it as a verb, as it is used here) is consistent with the usage here: distribute shares of something; synonym - disburse.
Not every definition of a word has to be consistent with a given usage in order for that usage to be proper.
Also:
dole out: To distribute something, either physically or verbally.
dole out: to give out (something) to appropriate individuals
While not every definition has to be considered, they could simply say “Apple has paid app developers 120 billion dollars
over the past 11 years”. Clear and to the point without the negative and incorrect connotations that come with the word.
Of course the developers earned the money they are being given, no one that I've seen has indicated otherwise. But Apple doesn't just process payments made to those developers by users. The payments are made to Apple. It collects the proceeds from sales. It then keeps its share and remits to developers their shares.
While not every definition has to be considered, they could simply say “Apple has paid app developers 120 billion dollars
over the past 11 years”. Clear and to the point without the negative and incorrect connotations that come with the word. The OP could have used different terminology, yes. That's almost always the case. And maybe some different terminology would have been slightly better. But the terminology used is fine.
Even saying Apple paid them could be misunderstood as suggesting that Apple was paying them for products or services provided to Apple rather than giving to them the money which they are owed from the sales of their products. We could say Apple remits a portion of sales proceeds to them or that it pays them. But we could also say, when referring to a total amount which has been paid to developers collectively, that it doled out that amount to them.
I don't see a negative connotation with the use of that term. 'Dole out' is a much different idiom(?) than 'the dole' is. The latter, yes, it has negative connotations. But I've used dole out and heard others use dole out, and never meant a negative connotation or considered a negative connotation as having been intended. It just, to me, means distributing something as is appropriate. The context determines what is appropriate - e.g., in equal amounts, or as needed, or as earned.
dole out
verbDefinition of dole out
transitive verb