But store owners will need to prove scale in order to attract developers, says Juniper
Juniper Research has forecast that app store downloads will reach 25 billion annually by 2015, up from 2.6 billion in 2009.
The market analyst attributes the growth to operators launching their own app stores alongside those already in the market from the various handset vendors and indies like GetJar.
Specifically, the report cites the likes of China Unicom's Mobile Market, Bharti's Airtell APp Central and Vodafone 360's Apps & Games Shop.
There is a caveat, however. Juniper says for the 25bn downloads to be realised app store owners need to prove that they have the scale required to attract sufficient numbers of developers to their platforms.
Juniper analyst Dr Windsor Holden said: “Apple has been able to achieve several billion downloads from a comparatively small handset base because customers are buying the iPhone for the apps. That’s not been the case with other handsets. So even if you have a subscriber base of tens of millions, your addressable market is a fraction of that – and spread across a variety of operating systems and handsets”.
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