How Apple Counted $1.4 Trillion in App Store Sales

Apple’s App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025, according to a new study by economists at Analysis Group, commissioned by Apple. The figure has nearly tripled since 2019 and, in Apple’s own telling, generated no commission on more than 90 percent of its total.

The study landed four days before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, its annual gathering for software developers. Apple is simultaneously defending its commission structure before the US Supreme Court, navigating a compliance standoff with European regulators under the Digital Markets Act (DMA, the EU’s framework for overseeing large technology gatekeepers), and facing a financial data deadline in an Indian antitrust investigation.

How the $1.4 Trillion Gets Counted

The Analysis Group study, released Thursday on Apple’s App Store ecosystem announcement, breaks its figure into three revenue categories. The table below shows what each one includes and whether Apple collects a commission.

Physical goods and services (Amazon orders, Uber rides, Instacart grocery deliveries, hotel and airline bookings through travel apps) account for roughly 79 percent of the total. Apple has never charged a commission on this category. In-app advertising, the $151 billion generated by ads that developers place inside their own apps, is also commission-free.

That leaves $149 billion in digital goods and services: games, streaming app subscriptions, in-app purchases, enterprise software. This is the category Apple commissions, at 15 to 30 percent depending on transaction type and the developer’s size. The phrase “90 percent commission-free” describes the combined share of physical goods and in-app advertising, which together account for more than nine-tenths of the figure by dollar volume.

The word “facilitated” carries significant weight in the methodology. A Netflix subscriber who pays through the web counts toward the App Store ecosystem’s total if they access Netflix through an iOS app, even though Netflix does not allow in-app purchases on iOS. An Amazon order placed through the Amazon app counts at full retail value, though the transaction completes on Amazon’s own payment infrastructure. Analysis Group uses “facilitated” rather than “generated” to capture this broader scope of commerce flowing through or alongside iOS apps.

The study has drawn scrutiny from independent economists who note that Apple commissions and publishes the research. Counting an Uber ride or an Amazon purchase as App Store-facilitated attributes platform credit to commerce that would likely exist regardless of iOS app availability. Analysis Group addresses the methodology across 20 pages, breaking billings and sales into subcategories including grocery, travel, ride-hailing, food delivery, and digital goods.

Apple’s Annual Pre-WWDC Argument

Apple releases a version of this study annually, with the timing consistently landing in the days before WWDC. Last year’s report placed App Store billings and sales at $1.3 trillion; the 2025 total marks roughly an 8 percent increase year-over-year across all categories. WWDC is the event at which Apple previews new operating system releases, developer toolkits, and programming frameworks, with this year’s conference scheduled to begin June 8. The study circulates each year as developers are evaluating the platform’s commercial opportunity heading into a new development cycle.

Apple’s legal team told the Supreme Court in a May 2026 filing that “regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States.” The study arrived the same week as that legal argument, giving Apple’s lawyers a concrete figure to cite when describing the scale of what regulatory action could affect.

Developers are the heartbeat of the App Store, and this year’s incredible milestone is a testament to their boundless creativity.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made that statement in Thursday’s press release. The release also noted that the company operates nearly 20 Developer Academies across Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the United States, with a new Developer Center in Berlin scheduled to open later this year.

Critics of the methodology have long noted that Apple commissions and publishes the Analysis Group research, and that the scope of what counts as “facilitated” commerce broadens the headline number beyond what Apple directly intermediates. The 20-page report breaks billings and sales into detailed subcategories to show that Apple’s commission falls on only a narrow slice of the commerce the platform supports.

The Commission Math on Digital Goods

Digital goods and services, the commissioned category, grew roughly 14 percent in 2025, up from $131 billion in 2024. Apple charges a standard 30 percent commission on most in-app purchases of digital goods and 15 percent for developers enrolled in its Small Business Program, Video Partner Program, and several other tier-specific arrangements. The full eligibility conditions for each tier are set out on Apple’s App Store platform page for developers.

Apple does not report App Store commission revenue as a separate line item. It consolidates App Store commissions, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple TV+, AppleCare, and other recurring services into a single Services segment. In fiscal 2025, Services generated $109.1 billion out of Apple’s $416.1 billion in total revenue, making it the company’s second-largest segment behind the iPhone at $209.5 billion.

• $149 billion in commissioned digital goods and services billings in 2025, up 14% from the $131 billion reported in 2024
• $109.1 billion in Apple Services revenue for fiscal 2025, the segment that includes App Store commission income
• $416.1 billion in Apple total fiscal 2025 revenue; Services accounts for about 26 percent
• 15-30% commission range Apple charges on digital goods, depending on program eligibility and transaction type

Because Apple consolidates rather than disaggregates, the commissioned digital goods category is the closest public proxy for the commission base. Apple’s commission revenue from that pool, collected at 15 to 30 percent depending on tier, sits somewhere within the $109.1 billion Services total alongside Apple Music, iCloud, and AppleCare, without a dedicated line item to separate it. The regulatory proceedings below all target who sets the rate on that pool and who can compete for access to it.

Active Legal Pressure in Three Markets

Rave, a cross-platform streaming service, filed a fresh set of antitrust lawsuits against Apple in June 2026 after Apple removed Rave’s iOS app in August 2025, citing what Apple described as unspecified fraud and content moderation concerns. Rave is one of several developers pursuing independent antitrust complaints alongside three larger regulatory proceedings, each focused on Apple’s in-app payment requirements.

The US Contempt Track

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, sued Apple in 2020 challenging the App Store’s in-app purchase rules. Courts rejected Epic’s broader antitrust claims but, in 2021, ordered Apple to stop blocking developers from directing users to outside payment options. Apple allowed external links but imposed new fees on purchases made through them. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California found Apple in contempt of court in April 2025 for willfully violating the original injunction. Apple has collected no commission on external purchase links since that ruling.

The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the contempt finding in December 2025 and sent the case back to the district court to determine a reasonable commission rate for external purchases. Apple asked the Supreme Court to stay those proceedings; Justice Elena Kagan denied the stay request on May 6, 2026. Apple filed a full petition for Supreme Court review on May 21, with the court scheduled to consider it on June 25. In its petition, Apple argues that being held in contempt was improper because the original 2021 injunction never addressed commissions on external purchases, and that the ruling should not extend to millions of developers worldwide who were not parties to the Epic case. Natalie Munoz, Epic Games’ director of corporate communications, described the petition as “one last Hail Mary to delay a conclusion to this case.”

The European Compliance Standoff

Under the DMA, Apple must allow alternative app marketplaces and payment systems on the iPhone in EU member states. The European Commission fined Apple €500 million in May 2025 for non-compliance. Apple’s response, taking effect January 1, 2026, replaced its original per-install Core Technology Fee with a Core Technology Commission (CTC), a 5 percent levy on digital goods and services revenue for apps using any EU distribution path, whether through the App Store, a third-party marketplace, or direct web distribution. The Coalition for App Fairness, an advocacy group representing Spotify, Epic, and other developers, accused Apple of sustained non-compliance, arguing the layered fee structure recreates an economic burden equivalent to the commissions the DMA was designed to reduce.

Policy researchers writing in ProMarket, a publication of the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, have argued the case shows a need for a US equivalent of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The EU’s compliance track record is central to that debate, since a successful enforcement model in Europe reduces the pressure on US legislators to build a parallel framework independently.

India’s Pending Calculation

India’s Competition Commission (CCI, the country’s antitrust regulator) found in 2024 that Apple had abused its dominant position in the iPhone apps market by requiring developers to use its proprietary in-app payment system. The case dates to 2021, originating with a complaint from a non-profit organization that later drew support from Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, and several Indian startups. The Delhi High Court rejected Apple’s attempt to pause the proceedings in May 2026, ordering full cooperation with the CCI while instructing the regulator not to issue a final order before July 15.

On June 3, Apple agreed to submit India-specific financial data to the CCI, with a deadline of June 25. India’s updated competition law allows fines calculated on a company’s global revenue rather than just local earnings, a formula that could expose Apple to a potential penalty as large as $38 billion in the most aggressive scenario. The penalty calculation depends on the data Apple is now preparing to hand over.

AI Apps and the Next Commission Argument

The growth figure Apple pushed hardest alongside the headline was the billing rate of AI-powered apps. In 2025, more than 40 of the top 100 apps in the App Store featured consumer-facing AI capabilities, and those apps grew billings at four times the rate of other top-100 apps. The App Store served over 850 million average weekly users across 175 countries and regions.

AI apps tend to monetize through subscriptions and in-app purchases, exactly the transaction types Apple commissions at 15-30 percent. If AI apps continue outpacing the rest of the top 100, the commissioned category expands with them. That growth has legal consequences in the US district court proceedings, where a larger commission base makes the rate dispute more financially significant, and in EU and Indian regulatory proceedings, where the economic stakes of Apple’s in-app payment requirements scale with the pool’s size.

The regional breakdown of the total adds context. China contributed $562 billion, the largest single-country share, driven by retail and food delivery apps that generate no commission for Apple. The US contributed $453 billion, Europe $184 billion, and Japan $52 billion. In the six years since 2019, billings in the US and Europe each more than tripled, while China’s figure more than doubled. Apple’s new Berlin Developer Center, opening later this year, places the company’s developer training infrastructure in the same region where its most formal regulatory compliance obligations are currently being adjudicated.

Apple’s India financial data is due to the CCI by June 25. The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider Apple’s petition in the Epic contempt case on the same day.