Mobile Applications Market

The 21st century has seen the rise of mobile applications through the technology of smart phones .The mobile apps market is very elastic and continues to expand each and every day. The mobile market has a wide variety of applications that no matter what type of interests you may have, there is something for you. Outlined further in this report will outline the demand for these apps, trend analysis, current market status, success stories and lastly the end users.
It was in June of 2008 when Apple Inc released its 3G Apple Iphone which featured support for third party applications. Then only a short month later the Apple app store was created. This took consumers by storm and in the first weekend over 10 million apps were downloaded. Since its release the app store has continued to expand with more apps and better quality apps that now range from E-books to a very humorous fart app. Shortly after Apple had seen rapid success with its app store, other leading Telephone providers like blackberry, Nokia and Android soon released a similar app store for their users. The evolution of mobile apps seems to be creating applications in which ease day to day living through our smart phones. For example in the Apple app store, there are apps which allow you to receive newspapers like the New York Times, or the Globe and Mail directly to your mobile device. There are also apps which act as a PDF creator, it allows for the consumer to take pictures of multiple documents, upload them all as one PDF and then have the ability to send it as an email. There are many more apps which will benefit each consumer differently, people are slowly realizing that these apps are becoming a part of day to day life and could not function without them.
When the Apple App store first opened, it didn’t have just one App in it, there were over 500. Therefore it is hard to determine exactly which particular company had theirs in the App Store first. What can be determined are the types of apps which were initially available on the day of the App store release. Of the 500 programs readily available, 33% were games, the rest were combinations of education programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools. Another thing to note, that 90% of these apps were under $10 on opening day. An Article was released in early 2011 which gave comparatives of Apps stores revenues for all 4 major competitors (Apple, Blackberry, Google Android and Nokia). The results for 2009 of total revenue combined for all four markets tallied to 828 million dollars. Then in 2010 a 160% market increase in total revenue earned coming in at 2.15 billion dollars. The leading competitor was apple with 82.7% or 1.78 billion of total market revenue.
The current economic status of the mobile applications market is static. The market has been penetrated heavily over the past few years with apps that cover a wide variety of consumer preference. The market is limited to those of breakthrough applications which could see huge equitable returns. The revenue of the 4 global app stores will continue to rise as more and more people are upgrading to smart phones. Back in 2007-2008 when applications were first introduced, majority of people using smart phones were predominantly business oriented people simply using it for emails and web browsing. You would rarely see a teenager with a blackberry or an Iphone, because of the sheer cost of one of these devices. On average to buy black berry not through the deals given by the big telecommunication companies would run you over 500 dollars. This was a risk most parents weren’t about to give their kids. To further illustrate this point, a chart was compiled by Gartner Newsroom to show Smartphone units sold. In 2009 the global market sales for smart phones was only 172 million. Move forward two years and that number has increased a jaw dropping 272% to 468 million and is forecasted to further increase to 631 million by 2015. So you can see just how popular and the direction of cell phones are heading in the future, and with these statistics also promises big things for mobile application companies as they will be seeing nice return on equity with more and more phones in the Market.
To grasp just how profitable this mobile industry can be for developers, I have found a humorous success story as I like to call it. A man by name of Joel Comm, like most human beings seem to find bodily function sounds particularly funny. He was the inventor of a top 20 selling app called IFart. His story started when his app was released on December 12th, 2008. In just a two week span, he could have never imagined this much success. The App was selling for 99 cents per download and sold over 100,000 units. To date over 1 million apps have been sold. These types of success stories are all over, the main success these companies have is that they charge only .99 or 1.99. When look at economic trends these days, most people are or were having financial trouble. With majority of apps being under that two dollar threshold, consumers are likely to purchase app because they believe their getting value. And with the numbers of smart phones as outlined above, the app developers know it’s only a matter of time before their app starts seeing a return on its original investment.
Now after reading these stories, some people start to think, well why can’t I build something as plain as this and make a $100,000 in two weeks? The answer is the upfront capital needed to produce these types of apps. If you had no background experience for designing an app and it is simply an idea you are want to bring to life, then you are looking to probably pay a pretty penny. Rates for programmers these days are not cheap, and if you want good quality work done on the app, you are going to have to pay even more. It has been said that to build you basic applications, few simple commands and decent quality graphics you’re looking in the range of $5,000-$10,000. If you are incorporating features like WIFI Capabilities, GPS locater, Scoreboards, Multiplayer Capability, motion sensitive (ex racing game), voice over etc. This could cost you in well over $100,000.
Another Potential risk involved with creating a mobile application is the approval process. The two major App Markets currently are Apples and Android. Each of which has a different approval system. To get your app allowed on the Apple store, it first must go through a screening process to ensure your application doesn’t mimic the core OS functionality, does not perform well, is vulgar etc. On the other hand, the Android market is open to most applications; the only way apps will not be published is if copyright infringement exits. So the overall danger arises when a developer has to decide which market to enter, there bound to get more users in the Apple market due to the sheer volume of traffic, but if it gets rejected than it’s a money and time wasted.
In closing with projected growth of the smart phones for consumers comes the exponential growth of the application market. The mobile application market has established itself, and now is the place where consumers are willing to spend their money on cheap applications and developers are all trying to steal a small piece of the overall billion dollar industry.

Works Cited
Apple Inc. Ipod + Itunes Timeline . 7 February 2012 <http://www.apple.com/pr/products/ipodhistory/>.
Dilger, Daniel Eran. Apple's rivals battle for iOS scraps as app market sales grow to $2.2 billion. 18 February 2011. 07 February 2012 <http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/18/rim_nokia_and_googles_android_battle_for_apples_ios_scraps_as_app_market_sales_grow_to_2_2_billion.html>.
Elmer-DeWitt, Philip. CNN Money . 10 July 2008. 7 February 2012 <http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/10/apples-app-store-opens-for-business/>.
Finn, Wendy. Andriod Market vs Iphone App Store . 18 May 2011. 08 February 2012 <http://www.brighthub.com/mobile/google-android/articles/74976.aspx>.
Maxwell, Aaron. Is Developing a Mobile App Worth the Cost? 2011 February 2011. 2012 February 2012 <http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/mobile-app-dev-cost/>.
Mobi Thinking . Global mobile statistics 2012: all quality mobile marketing research, mobile Web stats, subscribers, ad revenue, usage, trends…. January 2012. 2012 February 2012 <http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats#subscribers>.
Smykil, Jeff. ars technica. 2008. 07 February 2012 <http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/12/flatulence-has-never-been-so-profitable-ifarts-success.ars>.

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[ 1 ]. Apple Inc. Ipod + Itunes Timeline . 7 February 2012 .
[ 2 ]. Elmer-DeWitt, Philip. CNN Money . 10 July 2008. 7 February 2012http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/10/apples-app-store-opens-for-business/.
[ 3 ]. Elmer-DeWitt, Philip. CNN Money . 10 July 2008. 7 February 2012http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/10/apples-app-store-opens-for-business/.
[ 4 ]. Dilger, Daniel Eran. Apple's rivals battle for iOS scraps as app market sales grow to $2.2 billion. 18 February 2011. 07 February 2012 .
[ 5 ]. Mobi Thinking. Global mobile statistics 2012: all quality mobile marketing research, mobile Web stats, subscribers, ad revenue, usage, trends…. January 2012. 2012 February 2012 .
[ 6 ]. Smykil, Jeff. ars technica. 2008. 07 February 2012 .
[ 7 ]. Maxwell, Aaron. Is Developing a Mobile App Worth the Cost? 2011 February 2011. 2012 February 2012 .
[ 8 ]. Finn, Wendy. Android Market vs. Iphone App Store . 18 May 2011. 08 February 2012 .