Apple recently announced that its App Store now offers 225,000 apps, which collectively have been downloaded 5 billion times. Android Market, the storefront for the operating system that powers many other smart-phones, now boasts 60,000 apps and is catching up fast. And GetJar, an independent mobile store that offers programs for all kinds of handsets, claims 72,000 apps and 1 billion downloads.
As this is all part of the ongoing “platform war” between different mobile operating systems, the numbers should be taken with several grains of salt. The more the numbers are puffed up, not least with some double-counting, the more users and developers the respective app stores hope to attract. Ilja Laurs, GetJar’s chief executive, admits that his tally includes different versions of the same software. What is more, many apps are the mobile equivalent of marketing: they are given away to tout other wares.
In a recent study Juniper Research put last year’s revenues from mobile apps at nearly $10 billion and estimated that it will more than treble by 2015. Yet such figures are educated guesses at best, argues an analyst with a rival market-research firm which has refrained from making predictions of its own because of the paucity of data.
Apple says that it has already passed on more than $1 billion in revenues. Some developers are certainly making a killing. But success is often a matter of luck and much depends on how an app is promoted by the mobile store.
Despite the lack of hard data, at least the dynamics of the app economy are becoming clearer. And they seem to be more like the music business than the software one. On average, it takes about the same time to write an app as it does to compose a song, says GetJar’s Mr Laurs. Both cost about the same to download, $1.90 on average. In each case, some make it big but most never become hits. And apart from evergreens, such as games, utilities and programs to use Facebook and Twitter, even the most successful mobile apps often quickly fade into obscurity.
Read more at The Economist.
