Gigantic growth of Mobile Apps

Few years back, mobile phones were just good for the sake of using them. We had some early smartphones that had e-mail accessibility but desperately needed a stylus. There were few mobile browsers, hardly capable of displaying anything beyond simple links, images or text. But, today smartphones aren't smartphones but the container of countless applications. After seeing my friends, going mad for mobile-apps, I too decided to share respective facts and trends with blog readers.

Each year reveals an interesting trend for mobile apps. If the year 2010 was all about smartphones, then 2011 had been a year of the tablets and mobile-apps. According to US records, the Smartphone market grew by 0.6% in a period of three months, by November 2011. That means 1.4 million Americans bought a smartphone for the first time. Our cellular phones can run rich stand alone as well as client-server applications now. Understanding everybody’s mania for Mobile applications, recently IBM, finalized a deal of acquiring Worklight - an Israel based, mobile application development firm.

The exponential growth of Mobile apps market spawned more interest among the independent and freelance developers. For years, developing mobile services was mostly controlled and managed by phone manufacturers and network operators. Lately, with the arrival of new phones and platforms such as Apple iOS, Android, the entire picture got changed, absolutely. Quite a few market players joined the open source community to lower their costs with an intention to extend their buyer market. Lowering prices resulted into an increase in developer pool.

We can notice a surge in the number of users, accessing the Application Store. In line with Gartner forecast report on Mobile-Apps (2008-2014), the global application store revenue is anticipated to reach 58 billion dollars by 2014. Apple and Google propose single point of sale with AppStore and Android, but with completely different approaches. The popularity of these apps has now reached to a completely different level. Thanks to blogs and social networking site for increasing level of interest.

Since there is a flood of apps in the marketplace, advertising through and for these applications has been practiced for a while. With soaring competition among platforms, marketing for mobile apps is also one of the growing concerns. In iOS, AdMob application provides advertising blocks for contextual graphical ads. Mobile Application Advertising is certainly the next big thing to happen as more and more applications are moving from desktop to browser to mobile phones. If you are a freelancer in the same domain, develop further apps because mobile users are spending almost all time with their phones, now.