Looks like the holidays were good for Apple, because the Cupertino firm today reported that the App Store broke records during the last couple of weeks of 2015.
During the two-week period ending on January 3, Apple users spent more than $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases. That set back-to-back weekly records for both traffic and purchases. Those are the only records that the App Store broke recently, though, because Apple says that January 1 saw customers spend a single-day record $144 million. That broke the previous single-day record that was set one week earlier on December 25.
Phil Schiller, Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing, says that customers spent more than $20 billion on the App Store during 2015. And ever since the App Store opened in 2008, Apple has paid nearly $40 billion to developers.
The holiday season is typically when a lot of mobile devices are given as gifts, which results in a lot of new users downloading apps to use on their shiny new hardware. Some developers opt to discount their apps during this period to make them even more attractive to users, too, which can help to boost sales even further. Considering all of that, it’s no surprise that Apple saw some solid App Store sales numbers during the latest holiday season. That said, $1.1 billion is still a ton of money to pull in over a two-week period.