Barring a sudden drop in demand, revenues from the App Store are likely to eclipse worldwide box office revenues sometime this year, according to one analyst.

Long-term trends show that while global ticket sales are still climbing, the App Store has been growing at a much faster pace since 2012 and was already nearing equality in 2017, Asymco's Horace Dediu said in a recent blog post. Both industries are likely to hit the $40 billion mark in the near future.

The App Store calculation is based on Apple's announcement that it paid developers $26.5 billion last year. Apple typically claims a 30 percent cut from App Store transactions —allowing for the fact that it takes only 15 percent from some subscriptions, real App Store spending is estimated to be about 43 percent higher.

The full economic value of the App Store is much higher still, Dediu noted, since many apps are just front-ends for ad-based services, or ones which otherwise don't split money through the App Store —some examples being Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Salesforce. A rough estimate for the economic worth of the App Store in 2017 is $180 billion.

The public's App Store spending has been adding about $5 billion per year since mid-2011, and has helped make apps the biggest portion of Apple's services segment, which at an estimated $57 billion last year is enough to make it a Fortune 100 company on its own.

Source: appleinsider