Unless you’ve been living offline for the past year or so, you probably already know what kind of success Apple is experiencing with their App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch. Many other handset makers are trying to get in on the action by launching their own App Stores, so far not with the biggest luck. However, there are huge expectations to the market for mobile application. It was predicted on last weeks MobileBeat conference in San Francisco that there will be 10 million mobile applications in 2020.
“Apps will be as big if not bigger than the Internet,” according to Ilja Laurs, chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent application store.
“They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers,” Mr Laurs told BBC News.
In the meantime he also warns about the kind of hype we’re currently seeing with regards to mobile applications. Developers seem to get caught in some kind of “gold digger mood” but they quickly experience it’s hard to earn money in this market and 90% never gets their expenses covered.
Last week Apple announced 1.5 billion downloads in their App Store, currently containing 65,000 applications. While we’ve all read a lot of stories about developers making a ton of money developing apps in their spare time, there’s many, many more developers who never earns a dime.