Apple today at WWDC revealed that, to date, they have paid out $2.5 billion to developers as part of their 70/30 split in app sales revenues. Flipping the math around1, Apple’s thirty-percent cut of app sales comes out to a little over $1 billion.
Also announced today by Apple was iCloud and its storage APIs which provide Mac and iOS developers with the infrastructure to store their app data in the cloud and have it pushed to each of their users’ devices. Apple will be providing these new APIs and infrastructure free to developers—or at least sort of. In a way developers paid2 for the $1 billion data center in Maiden, North Carolina which supports iCloud with the thirty-percent cut Apple takes—not a bad investment.
Now it’s not direct causality but it does shows that Apple is spending more3 than what it makes from app sales to create better tools and infrastructure for developers and ecosystem for users.
If 1% of $2.5B ($2,500,000,000 ÷ 70) is $35,714,285.70; 30% ($35,714,285.70 x 30) is $1,071,428,571 or a little over $1B. ↩
At least in part, Apple will also be using the North Carolina data center for the other features of iCloud. ↩
This is to say nothing of the costs of maintaing the most lucrative app stores and best developer tools among other things. ↩
John Gruber:
If you’re mainly interested in Netflix streaming, I can’t see buying one of these over an Apple TV. Am I missing something?
Roku does have other content, like, for example, MLB.tv. And the Apple TV doesn’t have an API for an App Store. But: what if Apple opens up AirPlay to iPhone and iPad apps? Then the iPhone/iPad MLB At Bat app could stream video to the Apple TV.
Apple would be bringing world-class apps and developers to the big screen along with accelerometer, compass, 3-axis gyroscope, and camera laden controllers. And it may not just be games that could come.
This could be a big deal.
Design by Simon Fletcher. Powered by Tumblr.
© Copyright 2010
