iOS devices and services will have generated Apple over $1T in revenue between 2007 and the end of 2017, with developer payments currently at $20B+ per year
In its first 10 years, the iPhone will have sold at least 1.2 billion units,[1] making it the most successful product of all time.
Context & Ripple Effects
The $1T figure caps a decade that began with the first billion iPhones sold in mid-2016 and an installed base of over 1B active devices growing 25% year-over-year. Asymco's point is that iOS is no longer just a hardware business: the $20B+ annual developer payouts are the flywheel that keeps the device base sticky.
First-order effects
- App Store developers are now a revenue class of their own, collecting over $20B a year from Apple — payouts large enough that any change to App Store terms moves real income for thousands of studios.
- Apple's revenue base crosses into trillion-dollar territory for the platform, meaning each percentage point of iOS attach or services penetration is worth billions.
Second-order effects
- With unit growth maturing, Apple's growth story shifts to monetizing the installed base — the trajectory that shows up a year later as iOS users spending about $100M/day on apps and record Q2 services revenue of $9.2B, up 31% YoY.
- Rivals without a comparable paid-app ecosystem face a widening gap: the developer payout scale makes iOS the default first platform, reinforcing the hardware-sales loop.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the App Store becomes the durable asset rather than the phone: the corpus's endpoint is an Apple-funded study putting App Store billings and sales at $1.4T globally in 2025, with consumer-AI apps growing billings 4x faster than the rest.
- Platform economics consolidate around whoever owns the billing relationship — regulators and developers alike will keep pressing on the commission layer that sits between Apple's $20B+ payouts and its own services line.
The trend: Apple's business model is rotating from selling iPhones to taxing the commerce that runs on them, with the installed base — not new units — becoming the asset that compounds.