Every year is a good one for Apple, but 2013 was particularly lucrative for the company’s App Store. Apple announced in a press release today that customers spent more than $10 billion in the App Store last year.

This includes more than $1 billion in December alone. Customers downloaded almost 3 billion apps, making it the busiest month the App Store has ever seen.

Apple keeps 30 percent of App Store revenue, which means it made $3 billion in app downloads last year while developers took home $7 billion. The press release also states that Apple developers have earned $15 billion in the App Store to date.

The message here is that developers looking for the largest profit should be creating apps for Apple instead of Android, which now accounts for a larger share of the smartphone market.

The Timing of the Press Release

Apple’s press release timing was no accident, as this week marks a few occasions in the tech world.

The annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicked off in Las Vegas today and boasts keynote speakers including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai.

Apple always skips out on the big event, where thousands of new products are launched and showcased every year. So it makes sense that the tech giant would want to pull a little spotlight away from the competitive event.

Additionally, new figures from Kantar Worldpanel show that Apple has lost a large portion of the smartphone market. At the end of Nov. 2013, iOS held onto just 43.1 percent of the market, down from 53.0 percent a year earlier. Android scooped up most of the customers who abandoned the iPhone, jumping from 42.3 to 50.3 percent of the market.

The iPhone also lost traction in Europe and China, where its market shares have been historically lower. iOS accounts for 18.1 percent of the smartphone share in Europe and 17.0 percent of the share in China, both down from a year earlier.

Gartner analysts released their own set of data this morning predicting marketshares in the coming year, accounting for PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones. It predicted that in 2014, a full 45 percent of new devices would run Android, 15 percent would run Windows, and just 14 percent would use iOS or Mac OS.

Now that Apple accounts for less than half the mobile market and just a small portion of all new devices, it’s more important than ever for the company to convince developers to offer apps in the App Store.