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Apple: App Store shoppers spent $1.1 billion in record holiday season

Apple also had its biggest App Store sales day ever on January 1, with a record-smashing $144 million spent in a single day, trumping the previous record set on Christmas Day 2015.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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The holiday season was a record-breaker for Apple's App Store.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant announced its App Store customers spent more than $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases in the two weeks ending January 3.

Apple also had its biggest App Store sales day ever on January 1, with a record-smashing $144 million spent in a single day, trumping the previous record set on Christmas Day 2015.

To date, nearly $40 billion has been earned by developers on the App Store since its launch in 2008. Over one-third of that was generated in the last year alone.

"The App Store had a holiday season for the record books. We are excited that our customers downloaded and enjoyed so many incredible apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, spending over $20 billion on the App Store last year alone," said Philip Schiller, Apple's SVP of Worldwide Marketing.

The iPhone and iPod maker also credited the App Store for the creation and support of 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone. Apple says that more than 1.4 million of those jobs are attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the "app economy."

Apple also claims its app economy created 1.2 million jobs in Europe and 1.4 million in China.

Apple's record-breaking app sales are no doubt tied to the bevy of new products it brought to market in 2015, including the Apple Watch, a new Apple TV, and the new iPad Pro. The sales bump could also be related to the meteoric rise in Apple's iPhone sales, which increased 22.1 percent for the three months ending last October.

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