Apple closed 2025 with its strongest services performance to date, marking a decisive shift in the company’s revenue mix and strategic priorities. According to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, the services division delivered record engagement and financial results across entertainment, payments, cloud, and digital distribution. Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple News all reached new usage milestones, while Apple Pay and iCloud continued to embed themselves as daily infrastructure for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. SecondaryMarket.news published earlier about Apple’s services revenue and margin and its impact on the global secondary market.
Scale and engagement metrics
The scale of Apple’s services ecosystem now rivals that of standalone global platforms. The App Store alone averaged more than 850 million weekly users globally during 2025, underlining the depth of Apple’s installed base. Since 2008, developers have earned over € 550 billion through the platform, reinforcing the App Store’s role as both an economic engine and a strategic moat. Holiday season engagement proved particularly strong, with Apple TV achieving record viewership in December and Apple Music reporting all-time highs in both listenership and subscriber growth.
Financial contribution of services
Apple’s fiscal Q4 2025 results illustrate how central services have become to overall performance. Quarterly revenue reached € 102.5 billion, up 8 % year over year, with services contributing € 28.75 billion. This equates to 28.06 % of total company revenue and reflects a 15.1 % annual growth rate. For the first time, Apple’s annual services revenue exceeded € 100 billion, placing the division ahead of the total yearly sales of several major global brands.
High-margin economics
Beyond scale, profitability defines the strategic importance of Apple’s services business. Gross margin for services in Q4 2025 stood at 75.3 %, generating approximately € 21.6 billion in gross profit during the quarter. This compares with a 36.2 % margin for hardware. The disparity highlights why Apple increasingly views its ecosystem as a recurring revenue platform rather than a pure device sales model, with services now accounting for a disproportionate share of overall profit.
Secondary market alignment
These economics help explain Apple’s relatively supportive stance toward the secondary Apple device market. Users of refurbished or pre-owned Apple iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks spend nearly as much on services as buyers of new hardware. Every Apple iPhone that remains active extends the addressable base for subscriptions, in-app purchases, advertising, and payment transactions. From Apple’s perspective, device reuse directly reinforces long-term revenue stability.
Strategic implications
For the global secondary mobile market, Apple’s model reframes the relationship between hardware reuse and profitability. Rather than viewing refurbished devices as a threat to new sales, Apple positions them as gateways into a high-margin services ecosystem. As refurbished Apple iPhones increasingly compete with mid-tier Android devices, any dilution of hardware revenue is offset by sustained service monetisation.
Long-term outlook
Apple’s 2025 results underline how circular device flows and digital services can operate symbiotically. By extending device lifespans while maintaining user spending within its ecosystem, Apple demonstrates a commercially viable pathway for aligning circular economy principles with shareholder value. For recommerce stakeholders, this approach sets a benchmark for how secondary markets can support, rather than undermine, long-term platform growth.
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