Analysts at several research firms are predicting explosive growth for mobile  -app sales in the years ahead. A new report commissioned by cross-platform app provider Getjar, for example, forecasts worldwide revenue from mobile applications could reach $17.5 billion by the end of next year -- up from $4.1 billion in 2009.
Yankee Group forecasts that mobile-app sales in the United States alone will generate nearly $1.6 billion in revenue this year -- more than double the amount the research firm forecast just six months ago.
"We now expect that U.S. consumers will download almost 1.6 billion apps in 2010, and that those numbers will swell to more than six billion by 2014," noted Yankee Group report author Carl Howe. "Even more impressive, paid app revenue will swell from $1.6 billion this year to more than $11 billion in 2014."
Developers Driving Growth
Gartner Research sees consumers spending $6.2 billion at mobile-app stores during 2010, and expects advertising to generate an additional $0.6 billion worldwide. The research firm's analysts also predict that downloads from mobile-app stores will exceed 4.5 billion this year -- eight out of 10 of which will be free to end users.
By 2013, Gartner believes worldwide mobile-app downloads will surpass 21.6 billion, with free offerings accounting for 87 percent of the total. "Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry, and applications themselves will help determine the winner among mobile-device platforms," said Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi.
The Getjar-commissioned report released Wednesday is even more optimistic. "The overall mobile-apps downloads are expected to increase from over seven billion in 2009 to almost 50 billion by 2012, growing at the rate of 92 percent" compound annual growth rate, wrote the report's author, Chetan Sharma.
One of the key driving forces behind all these growth predictions is the plethora of apps being generated by third-party providers, Sharma observed. Developers used to get as little as 10 percent of the revenue from their mobile apps, Sharma wrote, but this has grown to a 70 percent share, which has made the entire mobile-apps ecosystem considerably more attractive for developers.
"Also, the development and the go-to-market costs have come down significantly, especially for the developers who want to focus on just one or two platforms," Sharma wrote. "Even though the fragmentation of platforms remains a significant problem, developers don't have to port applications to devices that will have little to zero return on investment." (continued...)
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