Apple’s second biggest revenue generator after the iPhone is no longer the Mac. It is intangible services like iTunes, the App Store and Apple Pay, which grew to $6 billion or 20% of overall revenue in the quarter ending March 26.
This shift to services is important for Apple at a time when sales of the iPhone, iPad and iMac are slowing; the company reported its first-ever annual decline in iPhone sales this past quarter.
The good news is that Apple now has an active user base of 1 billion devices, an ocean of Apple faithful that it can encourage to continue spending on software and Internet services made by Apple.
Yet one crucial web business which Apple seems to have neglected is that of messaging.
Messaging is being touted as a new frontier for tech, even the next big platform after iOS and Android. Facebook has spent the last year turning its chat app Messenger into what it hopes will become a thriving marketplace for businesses, and a new source of ad sales and transaction fees for Facebook.
Apple hasn’t done the same with iMessage, even though its chat app is one of the the most popular in the world by virtue of having 1 billion users of its hand-held gadgets. Till now there’s been no need: the money from those hardware sales was enough to break records quarter after quarter
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