Apps 'to be as big as internet'
Commentators at MobileBeat in San Francisco this week believe the market for mobile applications, or apps, will become "as big as the internet", peaking at 10 million apps in 2020. According to the Symbian Foundation, newly in the developer market, apps will become more personal and practical as their numbers grow.
"Apps will be as big if not bigger than the internet," according to Ilja Laurs, chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent application store. "However the developer community will decline drastically as each developer makes less money. 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.
Economics
While developers rush headlong to create applications for this burgeoning marketplace, Mr Laurs warned that many are simply doomed to fail. "The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple's] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool. "But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this," said Mr Laurs. He said that will result in developers taking their talent elsewhere and also slow down the rate of growth in applications.
In an interesting conference commentary Maggie Shiels of the BBC also spoke to Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, who commented he was not sure the consumer or the industry needed any more application stores, whilst Google's engineering vice president Vic Gundotra told the conference that the application store trend is just a fad and that the focus will shift to powerful browsers as the main mechanism for delivering services.
Read the full article @ BBC Technology