4 ms·
2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple services
- lapcat 9mo ago> Apple invests every day to ensure the App Store remains a safe and trusted place for users to find great apps. Last quarter, gross margins on "Services" revenue were 75%. The App Store is almost pure profit, with relatively little investment. See also: https://www.apple.com/app-store/ https://www.apple.com/app-store/ "Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps." Astonishingly, Apple appears to be bragging about these numbers, but if you do the math, 500 reviewers working 40 hours per week doing nothing except reviewing apps—no training, no meetings, no breaks, etc.—must spend an average of less than 10 minutes on each submission, to review the app and the App Store metadata (text, screenshots, etc.) for conformance with all guidelines, not only safety but also, more importantly to Apple, it seems, ensuring that the app doesn't somehow avoid giving Apple its cut of revenue. Not to mention that the salary of 500 reviewers is basically a drop in the bucket compared to App Store revenue.
- dhruv3006 9mo agoI wonder why the competitors are behind. Samsung has profits in the similar range right?
- ndr42 9mo agoAt least a human spends 10 Minutes with the app... less with updates.
- lapcat 9mo ago> At least a human spends 10 Minutes with the app Less than 10 minutes > less with updates How do you know?
- nixass 9mo ago> Apple invests every day to ensure the App Store remains a safe and trusted place This should read as "to ensure the App Store remains a walled garden not letting their users to own devices they paid fat money for"
- jjtheblunt 9mo agoYou can't tell how many software systems are evaluating app submissions though, before apps which pass might enter a queue for human evaluations.
- lapcat 9mo agoNeither can you. ;-) The page does say, "100% of apps are automatically screened for known malware," but that's also true of Mac app notarization, which costs the developer only the $99 per year developer program fee.
- jjtheblunt 9mo agoYep. I'm quite sure we're saying and noting the same thing.
- fra 9mo agoGross margin doesn't tell you much about their level of investment. Gross margin is only revenue minus COGS (i.e. hosting, support, potentially infra teams). To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share). SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
- lapcat 9mo ago> To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share). Total R&D for the entire corporation was $9 billion compared to $29 billion just in Services revenue. How much of that R&D do you think the crApp Store needs, compared to the hardware and the operating systems? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q4/FY25_Q4_Consolidated_Financial_Statements.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q4/FY25_Q4_Consol... > SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here. App Store is essentially an online retailer (or consignment store), not SaaS. Apple is selling software written by other developers.
- egypturnash 9mo agoMy spouse tried out for the people who sub-contract the app store reviewing and it was very much as you surmise, they require you to do a very oddly specific number of reviews in an hour (29, IIRC) and do not pay very well. Pay and time per review might have gotten better if he'd stuck with it and climbed to a similar level as his previous position in a mapping company but we are not at that level of desperation yet.
- lapcat 9mo ago> they require you to do a very oddly specific number of reviews in an hour (29, IIRC) You mean during the interview process? In any case, 29 per hour sounds... extreme.
- egypturnash 9mo agoNo, this is once you get accepted. It might have been 19, I'm pretty sure it was a two-digit number ending with a 9.
- knowitnone3 9mo agoApple invests every day to ensure the App Store is the ONLY place for users to find great apps.
- cyberax 9mo agoWe have the receipts. It typically takes Apple around a minute of in-app time to do the review. And you need to pay 30% of your income for that.
- ndr42 9mo agoWhat do they mean with: "#1 year for Apple Music listenership"? If it is "The year in which people that use Apple Music used more Apple Music than in the years before" than it does not sound astounding.
- graypegg 9mo agoI think it's just a bit of an obscure way of saying total subscribers. "${verb}ership" like "readership" meaning the number of subscribers + casual readers of a magazine [0], or "viewership" meaning a TV show's total viewers/ratings [1] I don't think I've ever heard listenership in that same context though, so they might have just made that up. haha [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_circulation#:~:text=to%20the%20reader.-,Readership%20figures,-are%20usually%20higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_circulation#:~:text=to%2... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_measurement#:~:text=television%20viewership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_measurement#:~:text=t...
- crazygringo 9mo agoIt says in the body: > while Apple Music reached all-time highs in both listenership and new subscribers. I'm assuming listenership is total subscribers. It doesn't need to be "astounding". But it is significant, given the competition from Spotify and YouTube and other streaming services. When you're not the most popular service, it's genuinely a challenge to be on the growing side of things rather than the shrinking side or stagnant side.
- knowitnone3 9mo agoIt's as if Apple Music was a monopoly giving it's the default music application same as Internet Explorer was the default browser. I'll bet Apple Music is so integrated into the OS that it would be impossible to remove.
- nemomarx 9mo agoIDK, isn't Spotify still very popular? hard to believe that's all from android users.
- F7F7F7 9mo agoWhen word came out that Tim Cook was shifting Apple to a service first business people lost their mind. I think the future (whether we like it or not) is a single general computing device (thin client, true laptop replacement) that can fit in one’s pockets, communicate and cast to terminals, and help power a set of wearables like glasses. That’s going to take a level of vertical integration that Apple is best positioned to do.
- mysteria 9mo agoI feel that the push will not be towards a general computing device though, but rather to a curated computing device sort of like the iPhone or iPad. Basically general in theory but actually vendor restricted inside a walled garden. With improved cellular and possibly future satellite connectivity I feel that this would also be more of a thin client than a local first device, since companies want that recurring cloud subscription revenue over a single lump sum.
- bloppe 9mo agoThat's the present, not the future.
- Juliate 9mo agoThe ongoing state of the world is not supportive of this concept.
- everdrive 9mo ago>I think the future (whether we like it or not) is a single general computing device (thin client, true laptop replacement) that can fit in one’s pockets, communicate and cast to terminals, and help power a set of wearables like glasses. It's hard for me to think of a worse future for computing. "Citizen, you are not wearing your computer-glasses, I'll need to look up your citizen-score manually. Please come with me to detention." "Yes, it's as the doctor says, myopia is unavoidable these days, now that computer-glasses are state mandated." "Officer, here is every single person who traversed the crime scene +/- 30 hours of the crime." "Social media addiction spirals out of control as users can no longer even remove notifications from their field of view." "Malware causes car crashes pop-ups obscure drivers." "After she broke up with me, her computer-glasses rendered me invisible to her field of view." "My computer-glasses were hacked and the attackers live-streamed me having sex with my wife." etc.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- BirAdam 9mo agoI am not an Apple Card user, so that mention meant little to me. I am, however, a user of many of their other services. In particular, I really love iCloud's email aliases and such. Great added benefit. My only real complaint with Apple is having ads in News+. If I am paying, take out the ads please. Edit: AdGuard DNS profiles are amazing for removing ads from apps, but seriously, I shouldn't need to do that when paying for a "premium" experience.
- shinymark 9mo agoAgreed completely. I started using NextDNS partially to get ads out of News+.
- solarkraft 9mo ago2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple‘s enshittification.
- alsetmusic 9mo agoHooray. If only these numbers weren’t a huge distraction from doing the work on their platforms that truly matters the most. Whoopee! Just before seeing this headline, I was wondering how aware the C suite is of the volume of blog posts about major (statistically provable) regressions in their design. The one about the substantially smaller clic targets for resizing windows on MacOS was only to stories above. Silly me. Of course they aren’t aware of the true scope. They’re too busy feeling great about their new services record.
- godzillabrennus 9mo agoTo the management team at Apple, the regressions in design aren't a bug; they are a feature. We are not the intended audience. They want to be the Cadillac of the 2020s and sell a premium experience to a smaller and smaller market over time.
- jen20 9mo ago.. what? Apple has a broader market appeal and penetration today than it has ever had. Your proposal _may have_ been true in the 90s, and in the early 2000s.
- glimshe 9mo agoDo Cadillac buyers like to deny access to the local network for the same application every week?
- concinds 9mo agoApple keeps discounting their products like crazy through retailers and shows the fastest shipment growth of any OEM.
- therein 9mo agoCan't even disable the internal webcam or make the external webcam you connected the default. Same for picking the primary audio input in a way that sticks. I am still yet to be able to update Tailscale in over a year because it needs some kernel extension update and a notification shows up for me to confirm it, I click on it, nothing happens. I go to System Preferences and it isn't in the silly place that they put it in. Close to zero thought goes into what they do.
- atonse 9mo agoThis all comes off as pretty insecure. As a way to say "look, you might think we're not up to anything, but look at all the incremental stuff we're doing. Look how big we are." I can imagine Larry David pointing his finger up and saying "Big numbers. BIG numbers!" Don't get me wrong, most people (including myself) love their hardware. The software's fine, except they've eroded a lot of trust in the past year. And most of their services are "eh it's fine. it works" - iCloud, Photos, Music, all that stuff is fine, it meets the standard, it works, it provides privacy, all good, steady things. We're generally satisfied customers. But the elephant in the room is that Apple has almost nothing to show 3 years into the biggest change in the tech world since the internet. And they could've spent this time deeply integrating it into iOS and truly making these devices feel magical again.
- Zak 9mo agoIt's a weird trait of our current economic structure that "we made a lot of money and we expect that to continue" could be seen as anything but great news from a company.
- atonse 9mo agoThere's something to be said for companies that just say "We're going to continue to milk our current cows for the foreseeable future" – yeah definitely, keep doing that. And they're printing money. But so was Microsoft under Ballmer. And you can see how much Nadella changed everything. There is such a thing as stagnating, but isn't always related to printing money.
- ksec 9mo agoThis is just Eddy Cue self congratulating himself. If there is a new CEO, he needs to go as well.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]