Gartner reveals top ten future mobile apps
10 KILLER APPLICATIONS will emerge on mobiles in the future, according to analyst house Gartner.
These 10 mighty app genres will produce the all prevailing applications that, Gartner predicts, we won't be able to live without. It's worth noting that this future is 2012, so two years time then.
So what's on Gartner's list?
Firstly there's money transferring applications. These will let people send money to various accounts using a Short Message Service. Gartner reckons there will be lower costs, faster speed and convenience compared with online or simply walking into a bank. The analysts are basing this on the fact that transfer services have strong appeal to users and most services signed up several million users within their first year.
Location-based services come second. The thought process is that everyone likes to know where they are, and Gartner predicts that the 96 million people who already use location services in 2009 will boom to more than 526 million in 2012.
Mobile search is ranked third because potentially it can make companies a lot of money. Consumer loyalty is high, apparently which means that people like Google and the Vole could do rather well out of it as well.
Everyone's getting into mobile browsing these days, with over 60 per cent of handsets shipped in 2009 carrying Internet capabilities. Gartner reckons this'll grow to approximately 80 per cent in 2013.
Mobile health monitoring is ranked fifth. Whether this means that mobiles will be fixed with heart monitors and defibrillation pads, we're not sure, but there are already apps out there that turn your mobile into a pedometer so you can probably expect it to start nagging you soon to get out and go for a walk.
Mobile payment made Gartner's top 10 list because of the number of parties it affects, including mobile carriers, banks, merchants, device vendors, regulators and consumers. Basically everyone's trying to get in on it.
Tying in with search, mobile advertising is the number six killer application genre. Mobile ad spend in 2008 was $530.2 million, which Gartner expects to will grow to $7.5 billion in 2012.
Mobile instant messaging presents an opportunity for mobile advertising and social networking, which have been built into some of the more advanced mobile IM clients. For this reason it makes it on to the top 10.
Mobile music, though so far disappointing, also makes Gartner's list. Still Rick Astley fans can expect this to also grow, according to Gartner. µ
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I wonder how Gartner gets away with these predictions when no one ever seems to track (two years later) how accurate they were. What's their batting average? I did this once or twice for Gartner on various topics. Their batting average is around .500, meaning a coin flip would be about the same in terms being right. And did you ever notice that it's always two years out? Why? Well because if it's one year, you won't have time to hire them for advice and if it's longer than two years, you have time to defer from hiring them.
That's mostly what I was going to say.... it's easy to predict stuff now, specially if nobody check if what they say actually happens.
And also.... SMS has been around for... how long? 15-20 years? Now, all of a sudden, people will feel the need to transfer money using an SMS! c'mon!
Provided people will get smarter (which is as likely as green men from Mars), my prediction for 2022 is that someone will finally understand that Gartner = Arthur Andersen.... A gas bubble, of the not-so-nicely-smelling kind....