Growth in mobile apps may have hidden dangers

Rating: Beware the ides of sustainable business models

In a paper entitled ‘Sizing up the Global Mobile apps market‘ , Chetan Sharma Consulting (with a little help from GetJar) has predicted that the number of mobile apps downloads will increase from more than 7 billion downloads in 2009 to 50 billion in 2012. However, the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) warns that care must still be taken if the industry is to thrive.

It says that, “Numerous issues must be addressed including sustainable business models, fragmentation and variance amongst handsets and app stores, as well as transparency around in-app billing.”

According to Rimma Perelmuter, executive director with the MEF, “The accelerating growth of the Android Marketplace and numerous apps stores confirms the rise of ‘applications’ as a whole new medium for media content which is engaging and entertaining mobile consumers.”

Source: Chetan Sharma Consulting

This sector isn’t going to be worth peanuts either. Chetan Sharma is predicting that the global mobile application economy will be worth $17.5 billion in 2012 which is more than CD sales, which should reach a mere $13.83 billion.

Does that mean app developers will be paid more than rock stars? GoMo News sure does hope so. The MEF is estimating that in Q2 2010, 21 per cent of all mobile entertainment revenues streams will come from mobile apps.

Here’s some more interesting stats from Chetan Sharma, “Though on-deck (operator managed) mobile apps sales exceeded those from off-deck in 2009, by 2012, off-deck is expected to hold the lion share of the mobile apps revenue.” In other words the apps stores are going to triumph.

Who’s to blame for all this? Apple. of course. “It wasn’t until the launch of Apple Appstore that the appsworld started to blossom in earnest,” says Chetan Sharma.

” First, it fundamentally changed the revenue model in favour of the developers which has become the current de facto standard (70/30) in the mobile apps business. ” We’ll drink to that.

Next the ITunes App Store brought more developers into the ecosystem since it fostered the notion of focusing on just one or two platforms rather than the entire device ecosystem as before.

Thirdly, the time-to-market equation changed for developers so that they can get the application from conception to market in a fraction of a time of what was possible in the past. Well, it seems that there’s good news all round, then.

BTW, has anybody noticed that Google has announced that the number of mobile apps on Android Marketplace have doubled to 30,000 in Q1 2010? Just thought we’d mention that.