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And Apple accounted for a whopping 99.4% share of those revenues
More than $4.2 billion of revenues were generated by mobile applications in 2009, according to analyst firm Gartner's latest report.
The big winners? Apple and iPhone developers. Gartner estimates that the App Store accounted for a stunning 99.4% of those revenues.
The thinking runs thus: Apple did more than 2.5 billion downloads in 2009, according to Gartner's calculations. It thinks that every other mobile app store combined generated just 16 million.
This is paid downloads, so stores like GetJar - who will doubtless have something to say about the research later today - are presumably not included.
Meanwhile Nokia recently claimed it was doing more than one million downloads a day on Ovi Store - but that was for apps AND content (ringtones, wallpapers etc).
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Gartner reckons that more than 4.5 billion apps will be downloaded this year across all platforms, generating $6.8 billion of sales. It predicts that this will climb to 21.6 billion downloads and $29.5 billion of revenues by 2013.
However, by that point, Gartner thinks that a quarter of mobile app revenues will come from advertising in free apps, rather than paid downloads.
Hi,
Could it be that someone misunderstood the Gartner report which may have meant that the Apple App Store had 99.4% of the appstore revenues and not 99.4% of the general revenues made in the market?
If you look at the original posting on the Gartner website (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1282413), it seems to refer specifically to "Mobile Application Stores" (and the name of the report is “Dataquest Insight: Application Stores; The Revenue Opportunity Beyond the Hype”).
Still, even if this is the case, the numbers look a bit off...
Hi,
There are a few things to clarify as far as the numbers we included in our "Dataquest Insight: Application Stores; The Revenue Opportunity Beyond the Hype" report and then press released:
1. indeed in our estimates and forecast, we consider only applications downloaded from application stores, i.e. a store front that can be accessed directly from a mobile device without having to go onto the Web and entering a Web address. Our revenue forecast is only about the revenue generated by applications (meaning we have ignored any kind of content such as ringtones).
2. our numbers are annual downloads and revenue, whereas most of the numbers in the industry tend to be cumulative. Apple's reported 3bn downloads as of 5-Jan, is inclusive of downloads that took place in the period from launch to 31-Dec-08, and from 1 to 5-Jan-10, which are not included in our numbers.
3. our numbers were put together in November and published to our client in December, which means they were estimate of 2009 year-end, rather than hard data.
