Apple’s profits from whole history of app stores: $189 million

Granted, that’s not meaningless money, I’d gladly pick it up off the sidewalk if I saw it there, but when you think about how revolutionary that store really is, it’s kind of a drop in the bucket. But as John Paczkowski points out, the app store has never been seen as a significant profit center on it’s own, rather it’s designed to drive people to the hardware and make them reliant on Apple-only hardware. Meanwhile, blogger and former Nokia exec Tomi Ahonen sees app development as the next tech bubble, saying it’s all built on speculation of potential goldmines that mostly don’t pan out.