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App Store Breaks Records, Customers Spent $1.22 Billion In One Week (cnet.com)
During the holiday season, Apple's App Store broke records with customers spending over $1.22 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. On New Year's Day alone customers spent $322 million, setting a new record for the App Store's biggest single day. CNET reports: "The App Store had a record-breaking holiday week and New Year's Day. The holiday week was our biggest week ever with more than $1.22 billion spent on apps and games, and New Year's Day set a new single-day record at more than $322 million," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. Gaming and self-care were the most popular app categories over the holidays. The Cupertino tech company calls out Fortnite, PUBG, Brawl Stars, Asphalt 9 and Monster Strike as the top downloaded games.
I seriously don't get why everyone loves these app fads. I paid for Wolfram Alpha and a game or two I never play and didn't consider paying again. But then again I'm richer than most people for a reason.
What apps are worth buying? Serious question.
It varier per person, per need and interest.
I like a number of weather apps.
If you do video at all from a phone (and you should, the quality these days from any modern smart phone is quite high) some professional video capture apps are useful if you know what you are doing. (basically Filmic Pro)
If you do photography much at all, TPE is an invaluable tool to understand how the sun and the moon will relate to your location through the day.
There are a variety of great weather apps that are useful for different things, I really like Weatherline and Weather Radar Pro.
Call blocker apps are invaluable with the rising levels of call spam.
On the iPad Affinity Photo is a for-real photo editor with almost all the desktop features.
Those are some paid apps I think are really worthwhile, of course there are scores of free apps that have utility at times. I'm sure there are a lot of other paid app examples I don't even use or have forgotten.
Basically I would challenge the notion that anyone paying for apps is spending very much money at all, because you can get an awful lot of utility for not much money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By coincidence, this good news for Apple is released just as Apple sales figures fall short of expectation and the share price is decimated.
Even my quite niche polar alignment app for astronomers/astrophotographers had a 50% increase in sales from Dec 23 to Jan 1. I guess people had time to take out telescopes and mess with their phones?
As I said in a recent thread, Apple slowing down their sales by taking away inexpensive options (iPhone SE - which BTW was also ideal for people who wanted a smaller device) and increasing prices to ridiculous levels is very short sighted as the app store revenue (which depends on market share) is their second largest source of income. Already it seems that their market share has dropped from 14-17% to about 11% (reports vary, that seems to be the reported average), which means they have started leaving significant app store money on the table. And as freemium etc games have shown, it is not that someone who avoids big lump sums (e.g. only $350 for a phone - IIRC the iPhone SE price) will not spend a whole lot in app store microtransactions...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS