Apple App Store sales topped $10 billion last year, helped mightily by December’s 3 billion app downloads and $1 billion in sales—the most successful month in App Store history.

“We’d like to thank our customers for making 2013 the best year ever for the App Store,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in a statement.

Developers have profited well from Cupertino’s success, taking home a collective $15 billion to date from App Store sales.

Apple credits its own iOS 7 update for inspiring developers to build new, better applications that take advantage of the new user interface. Singling out Evernote, Yahoo, AirBnB, OpenTable, Tumblr, Pinterest, and American Airlines, Cupertino praised the apps’ re-imagined content and increased efficiency and performance.

But the launch of surprise hits like Ellen DeGeneres’s Heads Up(Opens in a new window), ProtoGeo’s Moves(Opens in a new window), Simon Flip’s Afterlight(Opens in a new window), and Kevin Ng’s Impossible Road(Opens in a new window), alongside fan favorites and international sensations Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft(Opens in a new window), andQuizUp helped sales soar in 2013.

Apple’s sales numbers include only paid applications.

“The lineup of apps for the holiday season was astonishing,” Cue said, adding that “we look forward to seeing what developers create in 2014.”

Cupertino also tipped some up-and-comers to watch this year, including Duolingo (U.S.), Simogo (Sweden), Frogmind (U.K.), Plain Vanilla Corp (Iceland), Atypical Games (Romania), Lemonista (China), BASE (Japan), and Savage Interactive (Australia).

The App Store celebrated its fifth birthday this year by recounting some of its greatest milestones, like the one-billionth download on April 2009, or the premier of one of the platform’s most successful games, Angry Birds, on Feb. 12, 2010. By May 2013, the store had racked up 50 billion downloads in total.

For more, see PCMag’s lineup of The 100 Best iPhone Apps and The 100 Best iPad Apps.