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Mobile apps are big business
CHIN STROKERS at Gartner claim consumers will spend $6.2 billion this year in mobile applications stores.
Gartner said that games will prove to be popular throughout the year, and it expects to see as many as 21.6 billion apps downloaded by 2013.
However, it warned that overall free applications would account for eighty percent of downloads and urged firms to consider monetising them through adverts and additional paid-for features.
This year it expects to see some 4.5 billion apps downloaded, and reckons that these will be obtained from all the usual suspects.
“As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads,” wrote Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner. “Games remain the No.1 application, and mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money.”
Although many applications are free now, this could change as users and providers become more sophisticated, she suggested. “Growth in smartphone sales will not necessarily mean that consumers will spend more money, but it will widen the addressable market for an offering that will be advertising-funded. The value chain of the application stores will evolve as rules are set and broken in an attempt to find the most profitable business model for all parties involved.”
Perhaps then it will be the marketplace through which the apps are offered that provides the key ingredient for a monetary return. At least that is the view of Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner, who said, “Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry. Consumers will have a wide choice of stores and will seek the ones that make it easy for them to discover applications they are interested in and make it easy to pay for them when they have to. Developers will have to consider carefully not only which platform to support but also which store to promote their applications in.”
Yesterday a $1,000 app was released on the Itunes store. However, it may actually be worth the money. Bar Max is an app designed to help law students finish up their work for the bar exam.
And no, we don't mean settle their tab. µ
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OK, that was the prediction. Now, how accurate was it? Please update.
All of these apps and personal assets (laptops, mobile devices, etc.) constitute a blended environment. How does business protect its assets when an employee, subcontractor, or anyone, can compromise the environment with devices that bridge, and that can harbor faulty security protections? Policy has to be watertight, obviously, and there has to be education. I'd be curious to know if anyone else here is reading “I.T. WARS”? I had to read parts of this book as part of my employee orientation at a new job. The book talks about a whole new culture as being necessary – an eCulture – for a true understanding of security, being that most data breaches and system outages are due to simple human error. It has great chapters on security, as well as risk, content management, project management, acceptable use, policies, and so on. Just Google “IT WARS” – check out a couple links down and read the interview with the author David Scott. (Full title is “I.T. WARS: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium”).