Apple’s App Store did $10 billion in gross revenue last year. Of that, Apple keeps $3 billion and the rest goes to developers.
To put that big number in context, we’ve charted out the growth of App Store revenue versus mobile ad revenue, using data from BI Intelligence.
The overall mobile ad market is bigger, but not by much — $15 billion versus Apple’s $10 billion in App Sales last year. But if you drill down, the non-search part of the mobile ad market is $7 billion. That’s exactly the same as what Apple is paying out to developers.
This is good for Apple as it wants to keep developers on its platform. It can say that it is paying out $7 billion in sales to developers. Presumably, they can make a decent amount through ads, as well. This keeps them on iOS, despite it having a smaller share of the overall smartphone market than Android.