In a record-breaking quarter, Apple announced today it has sold 47.8 million iPhones, 22.9 million iPads and 12.7 million iPods, breaking sales records for both iPhone and iPad and iPad and have sold half a billion iOS devices to date. Overall, the company reported $54.5 billion in revenue, good for net profits of $13.1 billion during Q1 2013.

Overall, revenues were up 51.4 percent over the previous quarter’s sales of $36.0 billion, and 17.7 percent year-over-year. Net profit was $13.1 billion for Q1 2013, the same net profit a year ago at $13.1 billion. Keep in mind that Q1 2012 results included 14 weeks of sales while Q1 2013 only had 13. Earnings were $13.81 per share.

Overall, Apple sold 83.4 million iOS devices during the quarter, up from Q4 2012 when the company sold 46.2 million iOS devices. iPhone sales were up 77.7 percent from Q4’s numbers, spurred on by the holiday surge. iPhone sales were also up 29.1 percent over the same time a year ago.

iPad sales were up 63.6 percent quarter-over-quarter and 48.7 percent year over year. iPod sales declined year-over-year, falling 17.5 percent from the same time a year ago.

Although Apple wouldn’t detail a breakdown in sales between the iPad and iPad Mini, Apple CEO Tim Cook said “for last quarter, we had strong sales for iPad and iPad Mini.”

These figures were slightly below the median estimate among 65 analysts of $55.96 billion in revenue, according to a survey from Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

The company’s gross margin for the quarter was 38.6 percent, down from Q1 2012′s 44.7 percent and Q4 2012′s 40 percent.

Apple generated more than $23 billion in cash flow this quarter, and it now has $137.1 billion in cash and short-term and long-term marketable securities.

On Sept. 19, 2012, Apple stock reached an all-time high at $702.10, since then, the stock had dropped below $500 at $485.92 on Jan. 15. Apple’s stock closed today at $514.01 a share. However in after-hours trading, shares dropped more than 10 percent to $459.95 a share.

Startup 500px’s photo sharing app 500px and client app ISO500 were today pulled from the Apple App Store, according to a report from TechCrunch. An Apple reviewer told 500px that the apps were yanked because of an updated version of 500px for iOS, which “allowed users to search for nude photos in the app.”

500px COO Evegeny Tchebotarev yesterday told the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation that it could make the change to its apps to address the nudity concern, but Apple didn’t give 500px the time to modify its app’s update, and pulled 500px’s apps from the App Store today, says TechCrunch.

This isn’t 500px’s first go-around with concerns over nudity or “not safe for work” (NSFW) content in its apps. In an effort to appeal to all age groups, 500px updated its 500px iPad app in May 2012, removing NSFW photos. Although users who had an account could turn off a safe search setting on 500px’s website, allowing the user to see NSFW content.

Tchebotarev told TechCrunch that 500px is making the necessary changes to its app to fix the nude photo problem, and will submit the app immediately to Apple for reinstatement in the App Store.

Research In Motion (RIM) hosted a BlackBerry 10 community Port-A-Thon last Friday, resulting in 15,000 app submissions in 37.5 hours, which was confirmed in a tweet by RIM VP of developer relations Alec Saunders.

RIM incentivized developers for the event, doling out $100 for every app submitted and approved to BlackBerry App World. RIM also placed developers who had submitted more than five approved apps into a drawing for a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device.

RIM has a long way to go before they can compete with the top two platforms — Google and Apple. According to ComScore, RIM dropped another one percent (7.3 percent) among the top smartphone platforms, but remained in third place, behind Google and Apple. Three of the big four U.S. wireless carriers — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile — confirmed to Reuters on Jan. 9 that they will offer BlackBerry 10 devices to their customers. Sprint later told The Verge that they too will carry BlackBerry 10 handsets.

RIM’s stock was up 10.25 percent at $14.95 a share at the close of today on Nasdaq.

RIM will hold a launch event in New York City for BlackBerry 10 on Jan. 30.

Update: The Atlantic is now reporting that Schiller never even mentioned anything cheap iPhone related to the Shanghai Evening News. The newspaper made revisions to Schiller’s comments, who is now quoted as saying that Apple would focus on making “the best products” for customers and “never blindly pursue market share.” Shanghai Evening News removed all mentions of a cheaper iPhone handset in a new version of their story.

News organization Reuters posted a story yesterday that featured Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller dismissing Apple’s interest in making a cheaper iPhone. Reuters wrote a note on why they rescinded the story, citing that their story was based on a Shanghai Evening News report that was updated with “substantial” changes to its content, leading Reuters to take down its story.

Reuters didn’t elaborate what “substantial” changes were made to Shanghai Evening News’ story, which is still live on jfdaily.com.

A less-expensive iPhone would help the Cupertino, Calif.-headquartered corporation compete with Android in countries where phone subsidies don’t exist, lowering the cost of the premium priced iPhone handsets. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out on Tuesday, the cheaper iPhone would be aimed at emerging markets like China. The cheaper iPhone is predicted to sell for $99 to $149.

Apple is possibly looking into a cheaper iPhone, and Bloomberg believes Apple is considering a price range between $99 to $149 for a handset that would hit the market in late 2013. An unnamed source told Bloomberg that Apple has spoken with least one of the giant U.S. wireless carriers about its plans for a less-expensive iPhone. Although, Bloomberg didn’t make it clear whether the price it states includes carrier subsidies.

Apple’s reasoning for moving forward with a cheaper iPhone would be to target customers in emerging markets, according to Bloomberg. The cheaper Apple handset would allow the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation to compete with smartphone manufacturer leader Samsung, which runs Google’s Android platform. According to IDC, Android has a 75 percent market share of smartphone shipments as of Q3 2012, while Apple has 15 percent.

China, one of the biggest emerging markets, is currently a focal point for Apple. In September 2012 during the company’s Q4 2012 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said China accounted for 15 percent of Apple’s total sales, generating $5.7 billion for the quarter and $23.8 billion for the year.

A report from the Wall Street Journal claimed that Apple is working on a cheaper iPhone that will possibly release as soon as late 2013.

The WSJ cited its sources as “people briefed on the matter,” and added that Apple has apparently been exploring this kind of device for years. For background, WSJ previously reported about a less-expensive iPhone back in 2011, but the device never materialized. But the wheels are turning once again for a “less expensive version of the flagship device” to release later this year.

According to the WSJ’s sources, the cheaper Apple handset may look like the standard iPhone, but with a different, less-expensive body. One solution to a cheaper phone body Apple considered was a shell made of polycarbonate plastic versus the iPhone 5′s aluminum body. The guts of the phone could remain the same as the current iPhone or consist or recycled parts from older iPhone models.

Apple considered a cheaper iPhone as far back as 2009 in an effort to “grab market share and hook people on the brand,” sources told the WSJ. Designs for the cheaper iPhone were once drafted in mid-2010 before the launch of the iPhone 4, but the plans were put on ice after some executives worried about a second iPhone model complicating manufacturing processes, according to the WSJ’s source. Instead, Apple decided to keep older iPhone models on sale for less money. The WSJ added that Apple still may never even move forward with the device.

The iPhone remains Apple’s flagship product. Apple reported in its Q4 2012 earnings in September 2012 that it sold 26.9 million iPhones.

Apple’s stock closed today at $525.31 a share. The Cupertino, Calif.-headquartered corporation will have its Q1 2013 earnings call on Jan. 23 at 2 p.m. PST.

The Apple App Store exceeded 40 billion downloads in total, with nearly 20 billion coming in 2012, read a press release from Apple.

December in particular was a record-breaking month in terms of app downloads, with more than two billion apps downloaded during the month.

Apple added that DragonVale developer Backflip Studios and Supercell, developer of Clash of Clans and HayDay, raked in a combined $100 million for their freemium titles DragonVale and Clash of Clans.

“It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a statement. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.”

According to Apple, the App Store now houses more than 775,000 apps, up from the previously reported 700,000 apps. More than 300,000 of the 775,000 apps are native iPad apps, up 50,000 apps since Apple CEO Tim Cook reported 250,000 native iPad apps in the Apple App Store at the iPhone 5 launch event in Sept. 2012. Google last reported 700,000 apps in the Google Play Store, which made the app store tied with the Apple App Store at the time in quantity of apps.

Note that the 40 billion download figure excludes re-downloads and app updates.

Samsung is once again the top mobile original equipment manufacture (OEM), with a 26.9 percent market share, a positive swing of 1.2 percent, says ComScore.

According to the company’s latest Mobile Subscriber Market Share report, Apple held down the No. 2 spot for the second consecutive time since claiming the spot from LG in ComScore’s last report, with a 18.5 percent market share, up 1.4 percent. The bottom three spots of the top five were rounded out by LG with 17.5 percent share, Motorola with 10.4 percent and HTC with 5.9 percent.

123.3 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, which translates to a six percent gain in U.S. mobile market penetration, moving the needle from 51.9 percent to 53 percent since the end of August.

Google Android also remained the top smartphone platform, accounting for 53.7 of the market, up 1.1 percent. Behind the Seoul-headquartered corporation is Apple, which grabbed 35 percent, up 0.7 percent. RIM continues to lose traction, with a 1.0 percent loss, but not as big as last month’s drop of 1.7 percent. Microsoft came in fourth with a 0.6 percent loss and Symbian with a 0.2 percent loss.

ComScore surveyed more than 30,000 mobile subscribers in the U.S. during a three-month period from the end of August 2012 to the end of November 2012.

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Will Lovegrove, CEO and founder of Release Mobile. The company recently launch a new cloud-based data sharing platform called datownia, a product that helps companies connect their data to mobile apps and business systems.

Recognize this? “What’s new: content update”

You may as well write “we’ve got an immature mobile app strategy” in the release notes of your mobile app than “content update”. It means pretty much the same thing.

A search on Google Play and the Apple App Store revealed that more than 1,800 apps were updated in the last six months solely for the purpose of “updating content”. That’s 1,800 developer teams and their clients who worked together to update content in the app, test the app and then re-submit it to the app stores. In the case of one very high profile app — the U.K.’s National Trust — the data update went badly wrong and they had to make a second ‘patch’ release on November 28th. In the interim period, they suffered miserable reviews and their app’s star-rating plummeted.

Releasing a new version of the app into the app store just so you can update content in that app is bad for the app owner, the customer, the developer who built the app and the owner of the app store.

It’s bad for the app-owner because it’s a slow process involving technical work (meaning it’s expensive) and as demonstrated by the National Trust it can be risky. The problem is exasperated if the app has been published to multi-platform channels, e.g. iOS, Android, Web and others. If you don’t simultaneously coordinate the release of new content into all channels then you are creating marketplace confusion.

It’s bad for the customer because downloading excessive app updates can be a pain, especially if you are on 3G or in a broadband-poor area of the country. You’re only kidding yourself if you think that your customers will appreciate a new app version with fresh content because it shows there’s a team behind the app which is working to keep the app relevant. That may have been OK 2009, but it won’t be OK now. Customers may start hating your app if all the new version offers is fresh content. If you are in a competitive marketplace and your rivals can update their content without the need for a new app download then you are already losing.

It’s bad for the app store owner. Perhaps this is not so much of an issue given app store owners tend to be multi-billion dollar companies. But nonetheless, reviewing new app versions is work that someone has to do. Plus, the subsequent surge of downloads of the new version will consume machine and broadband capacity.

Finally, it’s bad for the app developer. Developers hate updating content by releasing a new version of software. Nothing is more frustrating for teams that take a pride in devising state of the art digital business solutions than to have to clean up a spreadsheet emailed to them by a client and hack that into a SQLite database. Developers don’t like handling client data, they don’t like going through software test-cycles (just for content releases) and they hate doing work which they know can be done better with a technical solution such as a CMS with API capability.

APIs are the obvious solution. The issue for many app developers has been that without a client-side API, it’s not possible to update content in apps elegantly. Sure, most good developers can easily create APIs using cloud services and the emerging backend-as-a-service solution providers like StackMob. But that’s not what’s needed. What’s needed is an API provided by the client, so that content update work can be delegated away from developers and back into the hands of the app publishers. An API creation project requires a different type of project, with different stakeholders and different budgets.

RSS is a good stand-in for a mobile content API (and frankly is often overlooked and highly underrated) but if you want to do something more sophisticated with your data than an API is the only real solution. And that’s where the catch-22 is. For many businesses mobile apps have been an experiment: a test to see what the market is like. Expanding a mobile app project to also build an API will require more money and a longer, more technical, project. However, spending more money when the market is unproven is not sound. Yet apps that don’t refresh with content are not going to be as valuable or helpful to the customer as integrated-apps. So how good a test of market potential is a static app really going to be? This is a problem which troubles a very large number of businesses who are just entering the mobile app market.

The answer is clear: any company wanting to launch a new mobile app must also integrate that app into a content management system as part of the project. This is something that developers must advocate and not let themselves be talked out of. Otherwise those developers face the same fate as the National Trust’s mobile app developer team and have to scramble to patch a software release which could have been completely avoided if the app was connected to a simple content API.

Footnote: the author of this article contacted the National Trust to recommend an API for their future mobile content updates and was informed an API project was underway and would be online in early 2013.

The Federal Trade Commission today updated its child online privacy laws that haven’t been updated in more than a decade, creating new guidelines that improve children’s online privacy.

Child-directed websites and online services will now have to obtain parental consent before collecting children’s personal information such as geolocation data, photos, videos, audio files or online behavior before sending the data to third-party companies.

The definition of a website or online service will expand to include third-party “plug-ins” on websites — for example, Facebook’s Like button — or ad networks that have “actual knowledge” that they are collecting  through a child-directed website or online service.

The particular law the FTC made changes to was the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa), an Act the FTC initiated a review of in 2010 to ensure it stayed up-to-date in this ever-evolving world of technology — especially with the rise of mobile devices and social networks.

The new rules explicitly exempt app “platforms” like the Apple App Store and Google Play from complying with Coppa because they only offer “public access” to kids’ apps, as opposed to targeting kids directly and exclusively.

“The Commission takes seriously its mandate to protect children’s online privacy in this ever-changing technological landscape,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement. “I am confident that the amendments to the Coppa Rule strike the right balance between protecting innovation that will provide rich and engaging content for children, and ensuring that parents are informed and involved in their children’s online activities.”

The Coppa Rule, which Congress passed in 1998, required kids’ websites or online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13 years old, but the technology landscape has dramatically changed since then.

The FTC, the federal agency that oversees business practices, will continue to allow websites or online services to collect children’s personal information for internal use, so long as the website or online service obtains parental consent via email.

Last week, the FTC released a report that found hundreds of kids’ apps that were acquiring data without parental consent.

The amendments to the Coppa Rule will go into effect on July 1, 2013.