Apple Inc said consumers spent US$1.8bil on the App Store during the last week of 2020, an increase from US$1.42bil in the same period a year earlier with people relying on digital services more than ever to stay connected to work, school and family.

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant said that most of the spending between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve went to games. New Year’s Day set a single-day spending record of US$540mil on the App Store, up from US$386mil on that day in 2020. Some of the most downloaded apps in 2020 were Zoom and Disney+, Apple said. The company has now paid out a total of US$200bil to developers, up from US$155bil a year ago.

In a statement on Jan 6, the iPhone maker also highlighted the performance of a few of its other services, but didn’t share subscriber numbers for some of the most important offerings, including Apple Music and Apple TV+. The company said that its Apple Pay mobile payments offering is now accepted at 90% of US retailers and that Apple Books now has 90 million monthly active users.

Services have become an increasingly key component of Apple’s overall revenue, topping US$53bil in 2020 and accounting for almost 20% of the company’s overall revenue.

The App Store is one of the biggest revenue drivers for Apple’s services segment, but has been criticised by some regulators and developers over the past year for the percentage it takes from app makers. Last month, Apple began a new program that slices the fee for developers to 15% of sales, down from 30%, for those that make US$1mil or less in annual App Store revenue.

 - Bloomberg