Mobile industry analyst Asymco has been crunching some more Apple figures, coming up with an average annual spend for iTunes users across apps, music, video and books.

The number? $40 a year each, based on iTunes grossing more than $5.5bn every quarter, and Apple’s announcement that it has 500m registered iTunes accounts.

Asymco analyst Horace Dediu goes on to note that Apple users “spend about $1/day for each Apple device in use, making the iTunes franchise an incremental 11% marginal revenue source” for the company.
His charts also estimate that Apple’s payments to iOS app developers overtook its payments to the music industry a couple of quarters ago.

Apple’s iTunes business, including sales of music, video, apps and e-books, is now the company’s fourth largest revenue-generator behind iPhone, iPad and Mac computers, but ahead of iPods.

That’s according to analysis by Asymco, which claims iTunes is beginning “to look increasingly as a viaable ‘leg stool’ upon which Apple rests”.

That’s based on $13.5bn of iTunes revenues in 2012, up from $10.2bn in 2011, and showing consistent growth over those two years’ seasons.

Apple’s announcement of a bunch of new iOS stats earlier this week has been providing industry analysts with food for thought on the growth of apps.

Asymco’s Horace Dediu has been crunching the numbers, reaching the conclusion that the App Store now accounts for “a third of all iTunes revenues” – around $4bn a year – with the other two thirds going to music, movies and other media sold on Apple’s store.
iTunes alone is thus generating $12bn of gross revenues a year for Apple, with apps increasingly prominent.

comScore has published its latest MobiLens figures outlining mobile and smartphone ownership in the US.

The company estimates that 123.3m people in the US owned smartphones in the three months to November 2012, with 53.7% of them Android handsets and 35% iPhones – up 1.1 and 0.7 percentage points respectively compared to August 2012.

With BlackBerry and Windows Phone sliding to 7.3% and 3% respectively, Google and Apple’s platforms are now hoovering up 88.7% of all smartphones in-use in the US.

There’s no doubt that Android is on a real tear when it comes to smartphone sales, with an estimated 75% market share in the third quarter of this year. But what does this mean for the businesses of app developers and publishers?

Industry analyst Horace Dediu, of Asymco, has some worrying graphs on the subject. Specifically, he’s digging into an apparent reduction in Android users’ engagement with mobile shopping in the US – something that hints at wider issues for the platform.

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