2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple services

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/2025-marked-a-record-breaking-year-for-apple-services/

by soheilpro • 6 months ago

50 52 6 months ago

lapcat7• 6 months 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/ "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.

dhruv30062• 6 months ago

I wonder why the competitors are behind. Samsung has profits in the similar range right?

lapcat7• 6 months ago

How is Samsung relevant? Android devices use the Google Play Store.

ndr422• 6 months ago

At least a human spends 10 Minutes with the app... less with updates.

lapcat7• 6 months ago

At least a human spends 10 Minutes with the app

Less than 10 minutes

less with updates

How do you know?

nixass• 6 months 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"

jjtheblunt2• 6 months ago

You can't tell how many software systems are evaluating app submissions though, before apps which pass might enter a queue for human evaluations.

lapcat7• 6 months ago

Neither 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.

fra• 6 months ago

Gross 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.

lapcat7• 6 months 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_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.

egypturnash2• 6 months ago

My 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.

lapcat7• 6 months 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.

knowitnone32• 6 months ago

Apple invests every day to ensure the App Store is the ONLY place for users to find great apps.

cyberax• 6 months ago

We 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.

ndr422• 6 months ago

What 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• 6 months ago

I 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%2...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_measurement#:~:text=t...

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

It 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.

knowitnone32• 6 months ago

It'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.

knallfrosch• 6 months ago

It's obviously a monopoly.

Like saying 100% of iOS users use their Apple settings app.

I know it, because it's bundled in my subscription. Did you know Apple doesn't support other vendors for native backup and so you need ICloud?

F7F7F7• 6 months ago

When 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• 6 months ago

I 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• 6 months ago

That's the present, not the future.

Juliate• 6 months ago

The ongoing state of the world is not supportive of this concept.

everdrive• 6 months 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.

testfrequency• 6 months ago

The teams working on Samsung DeX and Moto Smart Connect have arguably been beating on this for some time now…even Google is starting to lean into this with their Pixel devices.

Tade0• 6 months ago

I don't believe that this is going to be the case simply because it's more expensive.

Sure, Apple can and will do it, but hardly anyone has an iPhone in, say, India or is willing to shell out this much for a phone.

This business model will be largely restricted to developed countries where Apple has an established presence. Other companies either can't or are unwilling to go in Apple's footsteps.

snowwrestler• 6 months ago

I think Apple disagrees on thin clients, judging by how they continue to add massive compute resources to their devices. On AI for example they seem to be including the resources for quite a lot of inference to happen on-device.

So what is on the network? Copyrighted content: easier to stream that, and easier rights control. Connection: it’s not like your friends and family can be “on device.” Cold storage AKA backups. Geo data. Live data.

BirAdam• 6 months ago

I 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• 6 months ago

Agreed completely. I started using NextDNS partially to get ads out of News+.

solarkraft• 6 months ago

2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple‘s enshittification.

alsetmusic2• 6 months ago

Hooray. 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• 6 months ago

To 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

Do Cadillac buyers like to deny access to the local network for the same application every week?

concinds• 6 months ago

Apple keeps discounting their products like crazy through retailers and shows the fastest shipment growth of any OEM.

therein• 6 months ago

Can'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.

alsetmusic2• 6 months ago

Dunno if this will help, it might not be the source of the issue. Try this at the CLI:

`xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine </path/to/file>`

This is for app quarantine (who'd guess) when apps are newly downloaded or unsigned. Look up the command for more info.

There was some chatter here the other day (within the last week, I believe) about overcoming some bug or another that prevents MacOS from prompting when permissions are needed.

The solution was modifying an SQLite db on disk. I don't believe the change is documented where the public can verify the whole thing, but I think at least one person verified that it worked for them after the OP. The OP (or replying party) sounded reasonably knowledgeable about why this would work, fwiw. I'd follow their steps if I had the same issue and I wouldn't be nervous.

I think the second is more likely. Apparently, permissions in Sys Settings are pretty bad. I'm fortunate not to have had this affect me and my many devices that surely run that workflow.

senderista• 6 months ago

I just hit the "transparent lock screen" bug in iOS 26 where TouchID is disabled but it's impossible to see the numbers on the lock screen, so I had to reboot my phone to unlock it. Hooray! Also, my 5-year-old iPhone has never felt laggy or glitchy before this forced upgrade, now it stutters all the time. Guess this is a great way to force me to upgrade to a new phone!

spwa4• 6 months ago

That's Apple's whole financial plan actually. Force you to upgrade and add an apple services subscription. It's their only growth area too, so expect them to push hard. Very hard.

FireBeyond• 6 months ago

Right there alongside blurring the clock / signal strength / battery to unreadability while the rest of the screen is fine. Locking and unlocking, all manner of things, don’t work, need to reboot.

atonse2• 6 months ago

This 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• 6 months ago

It'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.

atonse2• 6 months ago

There'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• 6 months ago

This is just Eddy Cue self congratulating himself. If there is a new CEO, he needs to go as well.

2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple services

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