At the Global Developer Conference on June 9, Apple on Thursday provided new latest news about its global app store business, sharing the developers generated $1.3 trillion in bills and sales in 2024. The company stressed that 90% of these bills and sales did not involve paying commissions to Apple.

The study also noted that the total developer bills and sales of digital goods and services for 2024, powered by mobile games, photo and video editing applications, and other enterprise tools, is $131 billion. Meanwhile, physical goods and services exceeded $1 trillion due to increased demand for online food delivery and pickup and increased demand for online grocery applications.

In-app advertising revenue was $150 billion last year.

Apple said that since 2019, spending across digital goods and services, physical goods and services, and in-app advertising has more than doubled, with the highest growth rate of physical goods and services exceeding 2.6 times.

These figures are designed to highlight how the App Store creates financial opportunities for mobile developers who go beyond in-app purchases to sell. Storefronts provide developers with a place where consumers discover their applications, and Apple provides the technical infrastructure needed to run the application business.

The position overlooks the fact that the App Store is now a full-fledged ecosystem, and applications are the selling point of the iPhone itself. Today, developers can use many tools to host, distribute and manage their own applications if they choose, but Apple's policies prevent this.

However, this started to change. In a recent court ruling, Apple was asked to have developers link to their own websites to handle in-app purchases without paying for Apple's commission. In Europe, the tech giant is fighting rules proposed by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which directs Apple to give developers the rights to inform customers about alternative payment mechanisms.

The new data comes from Dr. Jessica Burley, Ph.D., an Apple-funded study by Andrey Fradkin, an economist at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Throughout the antitrust legal battle, the latter has worked with Apple for years to document the success of the app store to a more positive view of the company.

The study highlights other regional growth trends, such as how App Store has more than doubled its bills and sales in the past five years. Meanwhile, digital payment spending in the United States has also increased by more than seven times since 2019, thanks to the widespread adoption of mobile payments.

The report also reiterates other metrics such as how the App Store attracts an average of 813 million weekly visitors worldwide, and points to various investments Apple has made in tools and technologies to support developers such as coding and distribution platforms, frameworks, analytics, anti-Vlad systems, developer support, and more.