There is a version of Apple’s story that everyone knows. The garage. The return. An iMac in five colours. Those keynotes. The one more thing suspense. But there is another story — quieter, more patient, and in a way, more audacious. Of how a hardware company looked at its active base of over a billion devices and asked a question that would reshape its fortunes entirely — what if the Apple device in your hand (or on your desk) was just the beginning?
It started on 2003. The 99 cents pitch, with the iTunes Store. Steve Jobs had spent months convincing the music industry, already suspicious to any approaches, wounded by piracy, and deeply mistrustful of the internet, to let him sell their catalog online. They agreed, half hoping for a silver lining to that dark cloud. What they got instead was the foundation of a new kind of commerce.
The iTunes Store sold a million songs in its first week, and it didn’t even roll out in all countries worldwide. It was not, on the surface, a services business. It was proof of a thesis, that Apple’s customers would pay for digital things. They trusted the brand enough to make a transaction. The seed was planted in ground that no one had yet thought to farm.
Architecture of habit: App Store, 2008
When the iPhone arrived, with it came something that seemed like an afterthought, but certainly wasn’t it—the App Store. Structured thinking, typical to Jobs’ era at Apple, placed this. Apple did not have to try to build every application itself. Instead, it built a marketplace, took a thirty percent share of the sales (though regulatory hassles now are more prominent), and watched as millions of developers hopped on.
From programmers to a first time app developer, from small studios to corporates alike, the apps atop made Apple’s hardware indispensable.
The way this was structured, many an exclusive app was almost a reason to remain inside the walled garden. Each subscription renewal weaved a new thread of habit. In the summer of 2025, Apple announced it had clocked $1.3 trillion in billings and sales in the previous year, of which more than 90% were for developers who had to pay no commission to Apple. The 850 million weekly App Store visitor number gives context to how this has become one of the highest-grossing retail establishments in human history, with no high street stores or its own inventory.
Little surprise that Google on Android, Microsoft on Windows and third party app stores including PhonePe’s Indus App Store and Xiaomi’s GetApps are vying for a slice of the pie.
The expansion: Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Pay
Having successfully established that its customers would pay, Apple spent the next decade systematically building the subscription levers. iCloud arrived in 2011, putting cloud backup for photographs and contacts, and enabling syncing between Apple devices as seamless as breathing. Once you begin paying for the convenience of storage, there is also an unwillingness and inconvenience to migrate that storage to another cloud. A loving lock-in, not a hostile one.
Apple Music came in 2015, a late but formidable entry into streaming. And this was the logical successor to the iTunes Store. A year earlier, Apple Pay arrived and made the iPhone a wallet—it has still not been launched in India, but that may change in a few months.
Crown Jewels: Apple TV+, Arcade, and The Bundle
2019 and 2020 were when Apple really moved the needle in terms of width. Each more ambitious. First, in 2019, came Apple TV+, with a slate of original programming that leaned more on the storytelling than many other streaming platforms did. It was not the largest streaming service, and never tried to be one. The Emmy wins followed. So did the subscribers.
In 2019, Apple also launched Arcade, which turned the iPhone or iPad into something of a mobile gaming console. And then, with the launch of Apple One in 2020, the company did what every great platform eventually does—it bundled. Music, TV+, Arcade, iCloud storage, Fitness+, News+. This meant gathering different subscriptions into a single monthly charge, elegant and convenient. And from Apple’s perspective, difficult to untangle.
A long arc
The results speak with cold, hard arithmetic. Apple services reported a record-breaking year in 2025, generating $109.16 billion in revenue, and that’s up 13.5% from 2024. Apple Pay clocked more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales globally, while preventing more than $1 billion worth of fraudulent transactions, according to Apple’s senior vice president of Services, Eddy Cue.
A question analysts often asked Tim Cook and other Apple executives— what would happen if iPhone sales flatten or decline in any quarter? Not that either has happened in the last few years, Apple has nevertheless built a robust counterweight for the company’s financial health.
What Apple built with Services was not accidental, and it took time to piece together. The hardware opens the door. The services ensure you never quite leave. And at Apple Park in Cupertino, the architects of that structure fully understand that the most durable businesses are not the ones that sell you something once. They are the ones that make you want to stay.
