App Store Ecosystem Reaches $1.4 Trillion in 2025

Apple announced that its global App Store ecosystem facilitated more than $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales during 2025, according to a study by economists at Analysis Group commissioned by Apple. For more than 90% of those billings and sales, developers paid no commission to Apple. Apple says the ecosystem has nearly tripled in size since 2019. The total divides into $1.1 trillion from sales of physical goods and services, led by grocery, food delivery, general retail, and travel; $149 billion from digital goods and services, driven by games, enterprise apps, and video streaming; and $151 billion from in-app advertising. The storefront averaged more than 850 million weekly users across 175 countries and regions, per Apple.

Apple reports that over the last six years, App Store billings and sales have more than doubled in China and more than tripled in the U.S. and Europe. The underlying Analysis Group study, as reported by trade outlets, puts 2025 billings at roughly $562 billion in China, $453 billion in the U.S., $184 billion in Europe, and $52 billion in Japan. Physical goods and services were the largest category in every region, with general retail ranking first across all markets. Travel was the second-largest physical category in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil, while food delivery ranked second in Korea, and grocery and food delivery ranked second and third in China.

Apple says more than 40 of the top 100 apps on the storefront featured consumer-facing AI capabilities in 2025, and that those apps posted 4x more billings growth than other top-100 apps. Apple attributes part of this to its own developer tools, including the Foundation Models framework, which lets developers tap the on-device large language model behind Apple Intelligence for offline, privacy-preserving features at no inference cost, and to AI coding features in Xcode 26. Industry context: Dealroom's coverage notes that developers are also integrating third-party AI models and tools alongside Apple's on-device capabilities, across categories such as photography, translation, and design.

Editorial analysis: The figures describe the App Store as a large two-sided marketplace in which the great majority of gross volume is tied to physical goods and services rather than purely digital sales, which helps explain why most billings fall outside Apple's commission. The reported 4x growth in billings from AI-enabled apps is consistent with a broader industry pattern in which embedding AI into mainstream consumer apps tends to lift engagement and monetization, though the study does not isolate AI as the sole driver. Independent coverage has also noted that the headline figure comes from an Apple-commissioned study measuring total ecosystem commerce, not Apple's own revenue.

Whether AI-driven growth stays concentrated in a few categories or broadens across verticals; how the mix among physical services, digital goods, and advertising shifts in future years; and how regional momentum evolves as Apple expands developer infrastructure, citing developer centers in the U.S., China, India, and Singapore, with a Berlin center opening later this year. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled for the following week, may add detail on new AI frameworks and APIs.