Forrester Report Suggests Mobile Apps Are Just Getting Started
posted Saturday Mar 5, 2011 by Jon Wurm
Mobile Apps started to become advertised around 2007 along with the iPhone and the concept was adopted very quickly resulting in mobile apps spreading to almost every mobile OS imaginable. Today iOS has over 350,000, Android has around 270,000, BlackBerry boasts over 65,000 and let's not forget about WebOS or Windows Phone 7 who are continuously climbing the ladder. According to Forrester Research, revenue generated by customers purchasing apps will hit $38 billion in 4 years. The current revenue generated is around $5.5 billion, meaning that Forrester expects a 7 fold increase by 2015. They also attribute part of the mobile apps future success to a new category of apps that will store information via the cloud making the information easily accessible on many devices. There are already some Apps utilizing the cloud such as Evernote, but the trend is just beginning.
Hit the break to get the 411 on the future of mobile apps.
As their chart shows, 33% of smartphone users, in their sample group, download apps on a monthly basis. This number is bound to skyrocket with the addition of corporations that will start to develop apps for internal purposes along with the general growing popularity of apps.
The most interesting part of the mobile app adoption is that they are taking the Internet out of the equation. For example, a mobile app runs natively on the device and communicates with a server somewhere to relay information to the Cloud, if that is part of it's functionality. With mobile websites, the server has to push the user interface and back-end every time someone goes the website. Also, developing mobile websites that look and function properly on different platforms is a very inexact science, so all-in-all mobile devices focusing on running native apps with cloud usage capabilities is the way to go.