subject: Stages in Mobile Development [print this page] Stages in Mobile Development Stages in Mobile Development
The mobile development market is expanding drastically. New apps appear every day. Some are nice, some bear very little functionality, some are just funny while others are purely advertising and marketing. The total number of apps at the App Store totals to 225,000 apps with about 5 billion downloads, at least Apple stated that. While owners of Android phones can enjoy about 60, 000 apps and their quantity is constantly rising as the platform is catching up with its main rivalry. Other platforms are not worth mentioning as they have not reached even 10, 000 apps while GetJar, an independent provider of mobile apps for different platforms and gadgets claims 72, 000 applications being downloaded more than 1 billion times.
But really those great numbers do not in the least mean that all and every of the mentioned apps are worth talking about. Many of them are sure to offer lots of fun and entertainment, presenting easy and various ways to access social networking, a slew of necessary tools for a broker, a dealer or a merchandiser, a package for a tourist or just simple add-ons to boast of to friends.
Many apps are given away to make users to pay for premium services or "virtual goods" like weapons or clothes in online games. For example, one of the apps designed by Apple itself just allows its users to make a pre-order of the latest iPhone gadget. Everyone will agree that it possesses extreme functionality that is difficult to compare to.
But the best way to judge whether the market is really profitable is to analyze revenues got by developers or some other interested parties. Numerous researches on the topic can not agree to the volume of the market, though some mention revenues totaling $10 billion and estimating its trebling by 2015. The best and most unbiased way to estimate whether app developers are really making money is to analyze the data Apple, for example, provides on the revenues got from the App Store. As the company's representatives have recently stated the overall revenues generated from the launch of the App Store in July 2008 have reached $1.4 billion. Taking into consideration Apple getss about 30% of any app download, only iPhone developers earned as much as about $3 billion. The iPhone platform is the biggest so maybe the $10 billion number is a bit of overestimation, but nevertheless it shows how promising the market can be and in fact it is now.
So, a mobile app market drifts away from being a software market and is becoming more of an advertising or marketing industry. The recent acquisition of an advertising platform by Google as well as Apple's launch of its new advertisement platform that allows to create ads within an app, will givethe app market an incentive for further development and growth.
