Mobile Computing News

Photo: Stock.Xchng

The Mobile apps market is a booming business that, in the beginning of the iPhone apps rush, made many independent developers overnight millionaires. Now, with mobile apps having gained mass market traction on other mobile OS patforms like Android and beginning to gather momentum elsewhere, analysts predict the overall market could top £22 billion by the year 2015.

Educated guesswork

TechRadar wrote on Juniper Research’s forecast that by the year 2015, the revenue derived from mobile apps – a combination of paid apps, advertising revenue and revenue from services built around apps – will total £22 billion. This number is around three times the £7 billion derived presently.

From early indications, these Juniper numbers are bang on the money, but it is possible the company has underestimated just how big the burgeoning app market can get. Smartphones still account for less than 30 per cent of all mobile phones in the world, and, as smartphones eat up more market share, so too will the absolute number of mobile apps users increase. In addition, as people become increasingly more comfortable with the concept of buying apps, so too will the absolute revenue derived from each user increase. And if these variables add up nicely, the market could be worth considerably more than £22 billion.

Who gets the biggest pie?

Photo: Apple

But Dr. Windsor Holden, who authored the report, warned Apple could lose its market dominating role if they didn’t adopt a more open model. She says that if this model of revenue derived from applications is to continue to grow, then ‘the mobile industry must ensure that those applications are accessible by a wide range of handsets ranging from smartphones to mass market devices’.

Quite frankly, Ms Holden is wrong. The only reason the iPhone and the latest crop of Android apps work so well is because they’re built from the ground up for that operating system. Yes, mobile OS platforms should not fragment more, we agree, and cross OS-communication needs to become a possibility – in the cloud, perhaps – but if we go back to making apps for the lowest common denominator, the market will suffer drastically because of it.