There aren’t two thoughts about the beefed up popularity of mobile phones and how they have become an inevitable part of users’ lives today. According to ABI Research, mobile application downloads are expected to reach five billion by 2014.
Certainly, the wide-acceptance of handsets has resulted in such upsurge. The major drivers for this magnified surge are believed to be the growing adoption of smartphones which saw sales rise by 20 percent in 2009 and the proliferation of application stores.
“The iPhone’s share of the app market will contract from its 2010 level during the latter part of the forecast period, but it will remain the leading platform for applications,” commented Wireless Research associate Bhavya Khanna. “The big beneficiary will be Android, which will see its market share of total application downloads increase from 11% of the market in 2009 to 23% in 2014. This rapid growth is driven by the mass adoption of the Android OS by both vendors and consumers from 2009 onwards. There are now more than 14 phones that run the Android OS, and many more will launch in 2010. This, coupled with the rollout of application stores from both smartphone vendors and network operators, will see the iPhone’s share of the total market shrink between 2010 and 2014.”
Concurrently, the ABI Research anticipates revenue from mobile app sales to decline by 2013, as competition will lead to download pressure on application prices, and a larger proportion of ‘must-have’ applications will begin to face competition from free or advertising-supported substitutes. In fact, this has already commenced to take place with the release of Google’s free turn-by-turn navigation service.
To acquaint, ABI Research counts on such snowballing of mobile application downloads on the basis of its in-depth analysis driven by emerging mobile technologies and users’ wide-acceptance.