iTunes billings are up 25 percent year over year and Apple says its little music, movie, and mobile app sales through the iTunes Store made up the fastest growing part of its business over the past three fiscal quarters. That includes the 75 billion App Store downloads the company previously announced earlier this month.
Apple's iTunes the big name in quarterly growth
"We're seeing substantial strength there," CEO Tim Cook told investors during the company's third fiscal quarter earnings conference call Tuesday afternoon. "iTunes/software/services is growing the most, thanks largely to the App Store, which is almost doubling year-over-year."
He added that iTunes has been the fastest growing part of Apple's business over the last nine months thanks to iTunes-based software and services sales.
Apple reported US$37.4 billion in revenue for the quarter with $7.7 billion in earnings. Q3 iPhone sales hit 35.2 million, iPad sales came in at 13.3 million, and Mac sales were at 4.4 million units.
More than $20 billion has been paid out to developers to date, and the company's decision give developers better access to iOS features could help drive up sales even more. The company will be giving developers access to more than 4,000 APIs as part of iOS 8, and they're also getting a new app development language called Swift.
iOS 8 will ship this fall and developers are already working with beta versions of the mobile operating system.
Apple's one-stop-shop for Mac, iPhone and iPad content seems to be paying off for the company.
"The ecosystem continues to thrive," Mr. Cook said. "$4.5 billion income from services, and iTunes generated record billings thanks to App Store sales."
Investors seem fairly unmoved by Apple's earnings report announcements. The company's stock typically drops after an earnings report, but so far seems to be remaining relatively stable. Apple closed on Tuesday at $94.72, up 0.78 (0.83%), and is trading after hours at $94.20, down 0.52 (0.55%).