Smartphones and mobile applications are the latest buzz in the cellphone world and are already a part of almost everyone’s personal lives and businesses. In 2010, the word “app” because of its popularity has been chosen as the “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society.
To get a clearer view on this reality, an infographic from Topapps.net lays out in detail how mobile apps have changed the world.
According to Topapps.net, among the popular App stores, Apple App Store grabs the top most position with total available apps of around 850,000 and 50 billion total downloads.
Following the list are Amazon appstore with 75,000 apps, BlackBerry App World with 120,000 total apps, Google Play with 800,000+ apps, Nokia Store with 365 million apps, Microsoft Windows Phone Store with 145,000 apps and Samsung Apps with 13,000 apps.
On the basis of the market share and approach to the monetization, ABI Research (2013) has ranked Apple as the number 1 apps store followed by Google at number 2 and Microsoft at number 3. Wide variety of mobile apps are available among which the most popular ones are for games that accounts for total of 33%. Widgets hold 8%, Entertainment 7% and Social 5%.
There are various messaging apps used all over the world and among all, the top most position is taken by Facebook Messenger with 700 million users. WeChat has around 300 million users, What’sApp 200 million, Viber 175 million, Line 100 million and BBM 60 Million.
The direct revenue from the sales of apps in the year 2011 was around $7.3 Billion which is expected to reach the figure of $36.7 Billion by the year 2015.
The infographic clearly shows that mobile apps have largely impacted the way we do things. And apart from concluding that there is a great opportunity for businesses to grow in this area, this poses a couple of questions:
1. Is there scope to develop a custom app for your business? These can be internally or externally focused. The cost of doing this is no longer prohibitive and the benefits in terms of customer service, access to information and/or process efficiency can be high.
2. Where next? As custom software (apps) become more and more affordable and accessible – what is the next phase in this trend? More consolidation of apps across businesses or more specialization and loyalty?
Your thoughts?
