The Growth of the Mobile Application Industry
Mobile Application Development and the Future
With thousands of Mobile Applications being developed and released to the public every year, one has to wonder: whether this influx of applications will ever stop. Don’t we already have a mobile application for everything we could possibly need? The simple answer is – No. No, we do not have an application for everything we need and this influx of mobile applications is only expected to gain momentum in the future.
An article recently published by CNet news stated that this year alone consumers would download close to 10.9 billion mobile applications for their mobile devices. And that figure is only expected to rise with each passing year. In fact, it is estimated that by 2014, there will be an estimated 76.9 billion mobile applications downloaded in a single year! That means in the next four years, we will be downloading 7x the number of mobile applications that we are downloading today.
Initial thoughts would be “how can there be so many mobile applications available out there?” but the fact of the matter is that there is such a high demand for mobile applications, that even if mobile application developers create two applications that are similar, (i.e. – two gaming mobile applications or two online banking mobile applications), there still will be enough demand for these similar applications to both experience great success and profits in the mobile application development industry. A similar comparison can be made during the “dotcom” bubble in the 90’s; even though there were many websites which all reported the same news/information; there was enough demand for websites that many companies could create multiple websites and still experience website traffic from the high demand of the internet/world-wide-web.
Companies such as Apple (iPhone), Google (Android), RIM (Blackberry), Microsoft (Windows Mobile 7) and Palm are surely expected to reap the benefits of such high demand for mobile applications on their mobile devices; however, this also paves the way for opportunities for many small to mid size mobile application development companies to also experience profits from the high demand of mobile applications in the mobile market today.
The mobile application industry is expected to surpass $35 billion by 2014 (up from an estimated $4.9 billion this year) and companies of all sizes will have the opportunity to get a taste of success in this booming industry. It is difficult to predict accurately what the future holds for the mobile application industry but if things continue to progress as they have been in the past year, it certainly holds a bright future ahead.