What if the value of the app store market in 2012 was $0.00?
This week GetJar presented research that suggested the mobile market could be worth $17.5bn by 2012, which equates to 50bn downloads. It cheekily concluded that this arithamatic would make apps bigger than the CD market.
Made a nice headline, but when you consider that the only people buying CDs in 2012 will the 14 remaining fans of Susan Boyle (remember her?), it's not such an impressive boast.
To unveil its research GetJar invited a few journos to a roundtable in London to discuss the whole apps phenomenon.
Now, I'm old enough and bald enough to risk offence and chuck the odd bomb into a discussion. And it occurred to me that the big question is not how big the apps market will but whether there will be one at all.
More and more I'm hearing negative mutterings around app stores. Enough to make you wonder if they're sustainable.
Article continues belowAdvertisement
The big three concerns are these:
* The networks can't handle the traffic. Apps and mobile browsing have boomed thanks to flat fee data tariffs. But have any London based readers tried to browse or even make a call on O2 recently? It's pot luck. Crappy connections will piss consumers right off. Meantime networks will struggle to make £5 a month per consumer cover their escalating data costs.
* The developers will give up. App stores depend on innovation to encourage repeat visits. Certainly, there are fortunes to be made, but most apps don't repay their investment. How many coders will simply walk away when riches elude them?
* Consumer ennui. I've always wanted to write ennui in one of the columns (I'll do 'jejune' next week, kids). In this context I'm talking about the inevitable end of the novelty factor for users. Research suggests most consumer download a few favourite apps and then stop.
I don't necessarily believe this will happen. I just put the thought out there – and GetJar's Ilja Laurs was generous enough to admit that it's a scenario he discusses endlessly with his VC backers.
The other possibility, of course, is not that app stores will disappear, but that they will be sidelined by something else.
History suggests this is probable.
Think about it. Any discussion about mobile downloads three years ago would have been all about operator portals v D2C. No one would have mentioned device-based app stores, because they hadn't been invented yet (unless you count Club Nokia et al, but I don't).
So who's to say that some new thing won't come along. One fellow guest, Recombu's Andrew Lim, suggested that a single app might emerge that's so popular it becomes an app store in itself – the way Facebook went from being a website on the fixed internet to being a kind of mini web.
One thing's for sure. The industry needs to find ways to monetise its apps.
Maybe someone should run a conference about this.
Hang on. That's what we're doing!
Monetising Mobile. May 26th. What a great idea.
