Apple has had a very good start to 2018; and this is based solely on the performance of its App Store. The company has announced a record breaking $300 million (RM1.2 billion) in sales on New Years Day alone.
The number capped an extremely successful holiday period for Apple, where it noted users spending some $890 million on apps in the days between Christmas Eve and New Years Day (RM3.6 billion). Overall, the company is saying that iOS developers earned 30 percent more in 2017 than they did the previous year.
Unsurprisingly, Pokemon Go topped the app sales charts towards the end of the year. Apple is chalking this up to the newly introduced augmented reality features built on ARkit. The updated AR in the game adds a new dimension to the gameplay; including being able to sneak up on unsuspecting Pokemon to catch them. Of course, this also does horrible things for battery life.
The record setting amount spent on the App Store was clearly fueled by games, covering all of the apps Apple chose to highlight in its announcement. We assume that this is mostly from micro-transactions; seeing that the most popular mobile games are usually free to play.
