Apple announces 575m iTunes accounts, 900,000 apps available in the App Store, $10b paid to developers

At WWDC 2013 today, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company now hosts over 575 million accounts on its App Store, with more than 900,000 apps available to customers. Furthermore, the company revealed it has paid out over $10 billion to third-party developers, half of that in the last year alone.

Of the 900,000 apps, 375,000 are optimized for the iPad. The larger majority of these apps are at the very least being tried out by Apple users: Cook says 93 percent of them are downloaded each month.

For the sake of comparison, at last year’s WWDC, Apple said it had over 400 million accounts and 650,000 apps available in more than 120 countries. At the start of 2013, there were over 800,000 apps available.

The company may see 1 million apps in its store before the end of the year, but if not, it will definitely pass the milestone in 2014. Before that happens though, its biggest mobile competitor is likely to see more apps appear in Google Play first.

Last month, Apple passed 50 billion App Store downloads (compared to Google Play’s 48 billion), adding 10 billion downloads in just over four months. Cook reiterated this number again today, emphasizing it was achieved in just five years.

As for the money paid out to developers, the $10 billion milestone isn’t a huge surprise. After all, Apple revealed it had passed the $7 billion mark in January and the $8 billion mark in February. As such, the $10 billion mark likely came much sooner than June, but Apple likely saved it to for WWDC. After all, this is an event centered around developers.