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Apple App Store harvested your cash on New Year's Day

The App Store took in a record $300 million on New Year's Day, Apple says.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
Expertise I have more than 30 years' experience in journalism in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
Steven Musil
Apple

It was a very happy New Year for Apple's App Store.

Owners of iOS devices made New Year's Day the biggest sales day ever for the App Store, logging $300 million in purchases, the gadget giant said in a statement Thursday. That sales total is 25 percent higher than the same day a year ago.

The App Store has been vital to Apple's sales of both devices and the commission-generating programs and services made for them. The launch of the App Store, a year after the original iPhone's debut in 2007, made it simple for anyone to download games and programs and helped propel the phone to the status of hit device.

App Store sales were robust during the holiday period, hitting $890 million during the seven-day period starting Dec. 24, Apple said.

And Apple isn't the only one that benefited; on Thursday the company said iOS developers earned $26.5 billion in 2017 -- an increase of more than 30 percent over 2016. Since the App Store launched in 2008, iOS developers have made more than $86 billion, Apple said, a 43 percent increase over the total touted last year.

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