Apple has had a good year. Besides introducing the iPad Air, Mac Pro, and iPhone 5s, the company has cashed in on its App Store like never before. On Tuesday, Apple announced that over $10 billion was spent on apps in 2013, with over $1 billion coming from the month of December alone.
"We'd like to thank our customers for making 2013 the best year ever for the App Store," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services in Apple's release. "The lineup of apps for the holiday season was astonishing and we look forward to seeing what developers create in 2014."
According to the Guardian, comparing this Apple announcement with the previous year's shows that more than 225,000 new iOS apps have appeared in the App Store since the beginning of 2013.
A big part of that figure, no doubt, is the launch of iOS 7 in the early Fall, giving developers a new, expanded set of tools, with more than 200 new features and APIs, to work with.
Among the biggest successes in the App Store in 2013, according to Apple, were some surprises, among the unsurprisingly popular apps. Big hits like Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft, Puzzles & Dragons, and other games were very popular, but so were apps like Ellen DeGeneres' Heads Up, Simon Filip's Afterlight, and Kevin Ng's Impossible Road.
In all, developers have now earned a total of $15 billion from the existence of Apple's App Store, which, in a back-of-the-napkin calculation, means that a more than $21 billion has been spent on or inside iOS apps since the App Store's beginning.