Gartner Report on the future of free mobile applications
Makradar Technologies / / December 19, 2019
Market moilnyh applications are still driven by Apple innovation, it continues to grow at high speed: recent Gartner report states that by the end of this year will be loaded about 46 billion mobile application, which is almost double the 25 billion downloads in 2011. Among these downloads continue to dominate the free apps: they accounted for 89%. This superiority will inevitably affect the segment of paid applications: 90% of them will cost less than $ 3.
This trend in pricing will only increase. Gartner estimates the market growth of mobile applications by 2016-mu to 310 billion downloads, 93% of which will account for free apps. These figures suggest growing opportunities for those companies that assist application developers to monetize their alternative development ways: not only through mobile advertising, but also through in-app purchase, subscriptions and other ways of prompting the user to purchase a deferred content. Gartner predicts that by 2016 41% of the income from all applications will bring the "in-Appa."
Along with the continued growth in popularity of free apps will continue to grow the number of low-cost applications. According to analysts, by 2016 the cost of the application between $ 0.99 and $ 2.99 will amount to 96% of all paid downloads.
Growth of in-app purchases impressive applications with this model of monetization in 2011 accounted for only 5%, generating only 10% of the total income of the market for mobile applications. In 2016 the number of applications with in-app will increase to 30% and they will bring 41% of revenue.
Which of the platforms will dominate? We see a growing number of Android stores (most popular of them are owned by Google and Amazon), Microsoft aggressively raising its own Marketplace (which now has a hundred thousands of applications), and other players, for example, RIM's, also promote their app stores, but Apple - creator App Store concept - will continue to stay on top popularity.
Nevertheless, the popularity of Apple is still slowly declining. Gartner predicts that the share of mobile app downloads in the Apple App Store will be more than 21 billion of the total of forty-six this year. The share of App Store has grown by 74% - an impressive result, which, however, does not cover the overall increase in the number of downloads by 83% from 2011 to 2012.
«Apple now holds the largest market share, given the fact that the App Store is 25 percent of all existing mobile applications," - stated at Gartner.
The researchers also note that the overall increase actually provided by the application for other platforms: "The number of existing applications is increasing due to the growth in the number of app stores market, which belong not only development platform, but also device manufacturers, service providers and other communication players who want to create their own infrastructure for mobile applications. The share of application downloads in these stores will continue to grow along with the general growth of the market, but in general, the market for mobile applications will continue to be dominated by Apple, Google and Microsoft. »
Gartner gives Amazon as an example of a third-party store, which occupies a significant position in the market. In addition to the Amazon app store, as a long-term player and considered svezhezapuschenny Facebook App Center, which is considered to Gartner "Strong competitor" on the platform level, in general, arguing that "a strong brand and leading position in the field of social networking and social gaming." This statement is based on an ongoing demand for applications with built-in social integration of Facebook. This integration is today a prerequisite for getting into the Facebook App Center.
Also noted is the growth of other independent stores for Android, designed to meet the needs of users a variety of Android-devices. Particularly noticeable this trend in China, where Google Play until there is not enough, and app stores communication operators are frankly weak.
A source: Techcrunch