New Years 2017 was the biggest App Store day ever with $240M in purchases

Now that 2016 is over, some companies are taking time to look back and recap how they fared last year. And now Apple has shared some stats showing us how the App Store did.

New Year’s Day 2017 was the single biggest day ever on the App Store – with iOS users spending almost $240 million on apps. This is a little bit surprising, since you’d think Christmas Day is when people get new iOS devices and would buy the most apps.

For comparison, the company paid out a total of $20 billion to developers during all of 2016, a 40% increase from last year. It also means that a total of $60 billion has been paid out to developers since the App Store launched in 2008 – one-third in just the last year.

In terms of where this revenue came from, the U.S, China, Japan and the UK were the top grossing global markets.

And China specifically saw 90% growth year-over-year, which is a good sign for Apple. The Chinese market is a key focus for the company’s international growth strategy, and it’s a good sign that Chinese users are not only downloading more apps, but also spending more money on them. Speaking of China – the two highest-grossing app developers were Tencent and NetEase, both companies based in the region.

In 2016 the App Store’s subscription service grew to $2.7 billion, a 74% increase over 2015. Netflix, HBO Now, Line, Tinder and MLB.com At Bat were the most popular subscription services on the App Store.

Lastly the company announced that there are now 21,000 apps on the iMessage App Store, which hopefully is a sign that developers are continuing to build for the platform. For iMessage apps to really thrive over the long term developers will need to move beyond the sticker apps and start getting creative – implementing things like payments and video chat into iMessage apps – something we’re now starting to see.