The App Store broke all previous revenue records in the last quarter of 2016, with year-over-year growth of 43 per cent over the comparable period, Apple CFO Luca Maestri said on an earnings call.

Apple’s sales from its services business, which includes the App Store, Apple Music and iTunes, increased 18 per cent to hit $7.2 billion in the final three months of 2016. And the executive said the App Store is “the one that is driving significant growth right now”.

“It’s great to see that both average revenue per paying account and the number of paying accounts grew strongly during the quarter. And according to App Annie’s latest report, App Store revenue continues to outpace the industry overall, with more than double the revenue of Google Play in calendar 2016,” Maestri added.

CEO Tim Cook said that the vibrant developer community has created more than 2.2 million apps to date.

He reiterated that App Store customers broke all-time records during the holiday quarter, including $3 billion in purchases in December, while the developer community has now earned more than $60 billion, including in excess of $20 billion in 2016 alone.

He also said SAP will be rolling out its SDK for iOS, “providing its community of more than 2.5 million developers the tools to build powerful native iOS apps that leverage the SAP HANA cloud platform.”