The most important things we learned from Apple's earnings call (AAPL)

• Apple offered new details on its business with its earnings report Tuesday.
• New figures showed just how profitable its services business is.
• The company now has 1.4 billion total active users of its devices, up 100 million last year.

Apple may have pre-announced its revenue shortfall in early January, but the company offered plenty of important updates and details about the state of its business, and of the broader economy, during its official earnings call on Tuesday. 

From the state of consumer demand in China to the growth in streaming media, Apple's business stretches across a wide swath of industries and markets. And Apple CEO Tim Cook shared important insight on many of these topics during the conference call with analysts. 

How investors and analysts perceive those new items will likely be affected by their stance on the company going into the report; there were bits to feed both bulls and bears.

Here are the most important things we learned from the call:

SEE ALSO: Here's why Apple's iPhone sales won't get better anytime soon

Apple is really struggling in China.

We already knew that Apple was having a tough time in China — Tim Cook attributed the company's problems largely to that country in his letter to investors earlier this month — we just didn't know the extent of it.

Apple's sales in the Greater China region plunged in its first quarter by $4.8 billion, or 36%, from the same period a year earlier to $13.2 billion.

Cook had already said that Apple saw declines in sales of each of its three major product lines — iPhones, Macs and iPads — in the country.

On the bright side, Cook said that Apple's wearables products revenue increased 50% in China during the quarter. And, he said, Apple was growing its customer base in China: "More than two-thirds of all customers in China who bought a Mac or an iPad during the December quater were purchasing that product for the first time."

Apple's struggles in China extended to its services business.

Apple has pinned its hopes for the future on its services business, which includes things such as its commission on sales through its app store and revenue it gets from selling subscriptions to offerings such as iCloud.

Its app store sales revenue constitutes a large portion of its services sales, and a big portion of its app store revenue comes from the sale of games in China.

Unfortunately for Apple, Chinese authorities stopped approving new games last spring and that depressed app store sales and, in turn, Apple service's revenue.

"We believe this issue around the approval of new game titles is temporary in nature but clearly affecting our business right now," CFO Luca Maestri said during the call. 

In the first quarter Apple's services revenue grew at a 19% annual clip, at the low end of the growth its posted in recent quarters.

China isn't the company's only problem country.

On the conference call, Cook said the company is broadly having trouble in emerging market countries where the dollar has appreciated against the local currencies, making iPhones even more expensive than they would be otherwise.

In particular, Cook singled out Turkey, where the lira was down by 33% versus the dollar in the December quarter from the previous year. Apple's sales there plunged by nearly $700 million in the period from the year-earlier quarter, he said. 

But Apple also is struggling in some developed countries. In Japan, it's been hit by the decline of carrier subsidies, which helped to defray the upfront cost of phones, Cook said. Apple's overall sales in the country fell 5% from the year-ago period to $6.9 billion.