Total worldwide revenue collected by the mobile application market will pass $30 billion (around £19 billion) by the end of this year, according to ABI Research. That’s the cumulative total from chargeable app downloads, in-app purchases, subscriptions and in-app advertisements - and it’s almost doubled since the end of last year.
The mobile app market is generally seen as starting in 2008, when Apple launched its App Store, although third-party stores had been selling mobile software for a number of years previously.
Aapo Markkanen, Senior Analyst at ABI Research, said “Consumers’ high interest in apps has for long time been obvious from download volumes, but it’s 2012 that will go down in history as the year when the economic side of the business finally took off. We’re no longer talking only about a short-term gold rush. Apps have become a major digital industry.”
“Google deserves a lot of credit for rehabilitating its proposition as an app distributor in the past year or so. If the old Android Market was a garage sale of the industry then the new Google Play has begun resembling a respectable department store. We estimate the Android developers’ share of the annual app revenues to set around one-third.”
Strategy Analytics recently forecast that 350 billion mobile apps would be downloaded to smartphones and tablets between 2008 and 2017, with paid application downloads generating more than $57 billion (£36 billion) worldwide by the end of 2017.