The App Store has record setting $1.1B holiday season

New Year's Day set a single day record with $144M spent, beating out Christmas Day 2015

How was your holiday? Did you have a nice vacation? How did you spend it, by seeing family and friends? Or did you actually spend it buying apps?! Admit it, that's what you did!

Ok, so maybe that's not all you did, but it was certainly a big part of your holiday, at least according to Apple, which saw a record setting holiday season, with over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases, it was revealed on Wednesday.

The amount spent in the last two weeks of December, ending on January 3rd, set back-to-back weekly records for traffic and purchases. Not only that, but New Year's Day set a single day record, with over $144 million spent. The previous record had been set, you guessed it, on Christmas Day the week before. 

In all, over $20 billion was spent on the App Store last year alone. "Wow," is the best word I can use here, I think.

A big beneficiary of all of this has been developers, who have earned roughly $40 billion since 2008, with over one-third generated in the last year alone.

These numbers are great news for Apple, and they come out, somewhat conveniently, just as the company is reportedly going to have to cut production on its latest iPhone models, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, by around 30 percent due to overstock. Releasing these numbers is one way, it seems, to paper over that potentially bad news.

Smartphones are starting to slow due to oversaturation. China saw its first year to year decline in the smartphone market in six years, and, as a result, shipments of worldwide smartphone were expected to grow by only 9.8 percent last year, to a total of 1.43 billion units, the first time on record that they fell below double digits.

But one thing Apple does not have to worry about is people giving up on apps, as those are still growing strong.

Overall app usage grew by 58% in 2015, according to a report out from Flurry on Tuesday, meaning that it has now see growth for seven years in a row. While that growth it is down significantly from the last two years, when mobile app usage grew by 103 percent in 2013 and then 76 percent in 2014, it is still growing by a significant number.

Another important factor to consider is that growth is apparently coming from existing users rather than new ones, accounting for an estimated 40 percent of the increase in usage. That is up from 10 percent in 2013 and 20 percent in 2014.

Most of the app growth came from personalization apps, which includes Android lock-screens to Emoji keyboards, which saw a344 percent increase in sessions, as well as News and Magazine apps, which grew 141 percent, and Productivity apps, which saw 119 percent growth.  

(Image source: speek.com)