Apple has now sold over a billion iPhones

On the heels of yesterday’s quarterly earnings call from Apple, the company announced that it has now sold over a billion iPhones worldwide. 

Apple announced the news on its website this morning, with a statement from Tim Cook praising the phone’s success and thanking Apple employees for their work.  “We never set out to make the most, but we’ve always set out to make the best products that make a difference,” Cook says.

For context, over one billion phones running Google’s Android OS were shipped in 2014, according to a report from Business Insider. Those sales obviously cover more devices from a broader range of companies. The first iPhone went on sale in June 2007, making this a seven-year journey to hit one billion devices sold. 

Apple’s success in the market remains in its services business, which includes payments for games and in-game microtransactions on the App Store. Yesterday Apple reported that its services business had grown 19 percent year over year from 2015 to 2016.