Much of the iPhone’s success can be attributed to Apple’s ability to keep the product competitive throughout the years, with new releases and updates. iPhone sales jumped from around 40 million units sold in 2010 to nearly 218 million iPhones sold in 2018, which translated into an increasing revenue, reaching over 33 billion U.S. dollars for Apple as of third quarter of 2019. As sales increased, the iPhone's importance to the company's success increased, changing Apple’s business dramatically and becoming the most successful Apple product. The iPhone’s share of the company’s total revenue has jumped from around one third in 2009 to about two thirds of the overall revenue in the beginning of 2018. As of the end of 2019 the iPhone sales share composed roughly half of the total revenue of Apple.
The iPhone runs on Apple’s own mobile operating system, iOS, which is the second most popular smartphone operating system in the world, as of September 2019. Each of the 11 iPhone generations introduced to the market was accompanied by a major release of Apple’s iOS. For browsing and downloading applications to the iPhone, the user has to go through the Apple App Store, which had nearly ten thousand applications submitted to release to the iTunes App Store as of January 2019. Games, business and education are the top three most popular app categories in the Apple App Store, with games accounting for about a quarter of all active apps on the platform.
