Mobile Market overview
Mobile applications market is one of the most promising among new markets in the application development sector. Despite of the recession period it grows continuously. According to experts, smartphones will become most used cell-phones types in the next several years.
It is important to highlight that all mobile platforms start opening application shops. A brand new market sector appears. Apple App Store has already experienced over 2 000 000 000 downloads and it is only the beginning. Google Android Market and Microsoft Marketplace are already launched and will definitely make strong competition to Apple.
A huge highly competitive mobile application market will appear in the near future. That is why it so crucial to enter this market right now. This is the main reason for the necessity of occupying good market niches, creating recognizable brand names, and brand promotion. In only few years it will cost several times as it costs now.
Several game applications have already brought over million dollars to their creators during the first week of sales. The Apple Holdem Poker game has brought not less than $5 million profits in one year period. It is obvious that there is nothing else to wait for, as the market has already proved its substantiality.
Worldwide mobile phone sales totaled in 286.1 million units in the second quarter of 2009, it means a 6.1% decrease in comparison with the second quarter of 2008.
Smartphone sales have amounted to over 40 million units, which is a 27% increase if compared to the same period in the previous year, representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market
Now the smartphones market is the fastest-growing market segment. Gartner Inc predicts 27% year-on-year sales growth for 2009.
Apple’s expansion into a larger number of countries in the past years has produced a clear effect on sales volumes. iPhone is currently the number 3 on smartphone market.
The largest quantity of iPhones is sold in the USA, the second place belongs to Germany, but the actual difference in the sales is really huge. US market is currently the most important target for Applications release. Nevertheless, iPhone sales volume is rising constantly in China and India.
According to The Nielsen Company, in Q2 2009 there were 277M mobile subscribers in the USA, 71M of them have downloaded different application for their mobile phones. The most popular download segments are the following:
Average monthly downloads on App Store:
• Average number of Apps downloaded per user per month – 2.6 Paid and 7.6 Free Apps
• 50% of all iPhone users purchase 1 or more Paid Apps per month
• Average weighted amount spent on Apps per month - $9.49
• Average App purchase price – $1.86 .
Taking into consideration a high number of App downloads, we can see that nearly half of iPhone users are spending more than 30 minutes every day using Apps, nearly a quarter of them devote a full two hours a day. People are spending quite enough money on Apps for their iPhones for considering this market as a very appealing.
North America is one of the fastest growing markets these days. This constant growth is conditioned by RIM and Apple smartphones sales. Smartphone popularity is increasing with fast pace in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Smartphone market share with different operation systems in different local markets is illustrated below:
As can be seen from the above, by 2012 smartphone world market will be as follows:
- Symbian: 203 million mobile devices (39%)
- Google Android: million of mobile devices (14.5%)
- Apple iPhone OS: 71.5 million of mobile devices (13.7%)
- Windows Mobile: 66.8 million of mobile devices (12.8%)
- RIM BlackBerry OS: 65.25 million of mobile devices (12.5%)
- Linux: 28 million of mobile devices (5.4%)
- Palm webOS: 11 million of mobile devices (2.1%)
According to the Gartner analysts, the share of Android smartphones will be increasing with a high speed during the following years (by year 2012 the share of Android smartphone will reach 14%), i.e. Google operation system will be giving way to only Symbian OS (39%). iPhone platform will be the third in the TOP list with 13.7% market share.
As Computerworld states, Android will involve maximum of net and cloud resources of Google. Moreover, Google keeps introducing rapid enhancements to its mobile OS.
One more factor that contributes to the Android popularity in the world market is its openness and focus on different mobile devices producers. It is expected that over 40 new smartphones on the Android basis will appear by 2010.
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