You knew it was happening, you were and are a part of it. Heck everyone is a part of it… or is going to be… but now there is a study and stats to prove the obvious. Thanks to Stan Schroeder over at Mashable for this one.
Mobile App Market to Surge to $17.5 Billion by 2012 [STUDY]
Lithuanian-based GetJar, an independent mobile phone application store with more than 60,000 mobile applications for major mobile platforms such as Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, commissioned a study that predicts a huge surge in the number of mobile app downloads and the overall size of the mobile app market.
According to the study, created by Chetan Sharma Consulting, mobile app downloads should jump from 7 billion in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. By this time, the market will be worth 17.5 billion dollars, the study predicts, despite the expected lower price of mobile apps, which should drop from the current average of 2 dollars per app to 1.5 dollars in 2012.
GetJar chief executive Ilja Laurs makes another bold prediction, echoing the one we?ve recently heard from aGoogle
executive. ?It is easy to see how mobile apps will eclipse the traditional desktop Internet. It makes perfect sense that mobile devices will kill the desktop,? he said.
He backs this up with more data from the study, citing that 17% of GetJar users spend more time on internet-linked smartphones than they do on desktops.
Be that as it may, the work you do on your desktop is still a lot different than the work you do on your smartphone. The mobile application market definitely has tremendous room to grow, especially with the coming of iPad, which takes the mobile app paradigm and slaps it onto a bigger, tablet device. But let?s wait and see how it performs on the market before we declare desktop dead or irrelevant.
John Ayers 