Apple’s primary focus might be to sell hardware – iPhones, iPods and iPads – but the tech giant is doing okay as a content distributor, too.
Or, more than okay, as Fierce Mobile Content reports.
In fact, in just the last two months, the iTunes App Store has added some 50,000 apps to its library, pushing the total of apps available on Apple’s iOS platform up over 600,000. Apple announced the numbers during its earnings call for the second quarter of 2012 on Tuesday, noting that the App Store is now available to users in 123 countries. Of the 600,000 apps the store carries, some 200,000 are specifically optimized for the iPad.
Apple also revealed that iTunes itself dragged in some $1.9 billion in revenue in just the second quarter of 2012. The store sells apps for iOS, as well as music, movies, podcasts and e-books, all of which contributed to the giant take. Apple receives a 30 percent cut of revenue generated by content sold through iTunes, which means that app developers and content makers shared some $1.33 billion in revenue from the digital portal. The leftover $570 million, Apple said, went to iTunes operational costs. Apple also said developers have made more than $4 billion from the App Store since it was launched in 2008.
For the entire quarter, Apple said it pulled down $39.2 billion in revenue, which is up from the $24.7 billion it earned during the same period last year. The company sold 35.1 million iPhones during the quarter, which leapt up 88 percent from the year before, and sold 11.8 million iPads; that increase was 151 percent. Worldwide, Apple said it has activated around 365 million iOS devices, 67 million of which are iPads. It also stated that iCloud, its cloud storage service, has garnered around 125 million users.
So, obviously, it’s been a good quarter for Apple, which spent the early part of 2012 riding the momentum of the iPhone 4S and the third-generation iPad. As we draw closer to the expected release of the iPhone 5 sometime in the fall, however, it’s likely that iPhone sales will drop off. They tend to do that as the company nears a new product release, since customers are waiting for the best Apple has to offer rather than upgrading to last year’s hardware.
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