You Know What’s Cool? Paying $20 Billion To Developers. Apple’s Done it.

Making money developing apps, especially for an independent developer, isn’t exactly easy. If you develop apps for any of Apple’s platforms there’s a good chance you’ve made a couple bucks here or there. Guess how much money Apple has paid to developers using the App Store? $20 billion. That’s billion, with a ‘B’.

Apple has paid out, in total, $1B by June 2010, $2.5B by 2011, $5B by 2012, and by 2014 a cool $20B. That’s incredible growth. A giant payout for independent developers who often find it difficult to gain traction and customers on their own.

What’s insane is that it took 4 years for the company to hit the $5 billion in payout milestone. It took another two years to payout another $15 billion to developers.

Here’s a nice tale about why the App Store is so successful, from a consumer standpoint:

I woke up this morning, and at the top of my ToDo list was buying Hemingway, an interesting editing tool for writers. The company just released a desktop version of their app, and I was keen to try it out on a couple articles today while I made my editing rounds.

I navigated to their website. I clicked the “Buy now for Mac OS X” button. Then I immediately abandoned my purchase when I realized I had to go find my wallet and Visa. I haven’t seen my wallet for a couple of days. I blamed my kids like all good parents do, then I moved on to another task.

Apps, for most, are impulse buys, especially if they fall into the “less than $5 bucks” category. Apple gets it. How couldn’t they? They make it painfully easy for customers to make purchases in a click or two. Without having to do anything outside of inserting a password into the App Store, I find myself buying way more apps than in the past.

The App Store isn’t all roses, especially for developers, but for this lazy customer $20 Billion doesn’t lie. People want the easy buy, not to jump through hoopsfor a $5.00 application.


 

Also,

Dear Hemingway, please find a path to the App Store.

Signed,

Josh

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio