During its Q4 2012 earnings call today, Apple announced that iCloud, its cloud storage and backup service for documents, contacts, photos, music and other data, now has 190 million users. That’s up from the 150 million users the company cited during its last earnings call in July and the 125 million it announced in April.
Apple’s last numbers came just a day ahead of the launch of Mountain Lion, the company’s first version of its desktop operating system that features a deep integration with iCloud. With the release of Mountain Lion, Apple also made iCloud a more interesting option for third-party developers and there are now quite a few apps in the OS X App Store that use iCloud as a backup and syncing solution. Apple itself, of course, is also still expanding the number of its own apps with iCloud support. Just this week, for example, it launched the new version of iBooks, which now automatically keeps users’ bookshelves in sync between their different iOS devices.
Apple provides its users with 5GB of free storage space on iCloud. Users who need more can pay $20 per year for 10GB of additional storage (for a total of 15GB), $40 for 20GB and $100 for 50GB.
