Mobile App Download and Revenue Growth Trends

Mobile apps are huge. If you’re not sold on just how rel­e­vant this indus­try is, take a look at the stats on our info­graph­ic and read on.

While a com­par­i­son of rev­enue tells us how much mon­ey has been gen­er­at­ed by apps, exam­in­ing the trend in growth tells us a lit­tle more about where the indus­try has evolved from, and what expec­ta­tions we should have about future growth. 

At the start of 2011, Nielsen, one of the fore­most media mea­sure­ment and analy­sis com­pa­nies, esti­mat­ed that by the year end, there would be near­ly 18 bil­lion mobile app down­loads across all plat­forms, hav­ing just come out of 2010 with a world­wide app down­load vol­ume of 8 bil­lion. With Nielsen’s pro­ject­ed 125% increase in down­load vol­ume, many media out­lets spec­u­lat­ed that the data analy­sis company’s fig­ures were inflat­ed, with some pro­ject­ing clos­er to 100% on the high­er side.  At ISBX we remem­ber these fig­ures very well, as we too, tout­ed the growth of the mobile app mar­ket, with per­haps a slight inse­cu­ri­ty about these “fore­cast­ed” growth fig­ures. How­ev­er, by the end of 2011, the actu­al down­load fig­ure topped a mind-blow­ing 25 bil­lion, a 225% increase from the year pri­or, silenc­ing all critics.

For us at ISBX, we use these sta­tis­tics to help inform busi­ness­es about the poten­tial for increased sales rev­enue when using mobile apps as a way of han­dling pur­chas­es. In 2009, just 4.5% of smart­phone users were using their phones to make in-app pur­chas­es.  Today near­ly one-quar­ter of smart­phone users are buy­ing prod­ucts and effect­ing trans­ac­tions direct­ly through apps.

This year was also the first year that smart­phone sales sur­passed fea­ture phone sales (non-smart­phones for the lay­man), a rather impres­sive feat, when con­sid­er­ing the price pre­mi­um on a smart­phone. This helps us draw some assump­tions about the min­i­mum expec­ta­tions of the aver­age mobile phone user. With over one bil­lion of these devices in dis­tri­b­u­tion, it’s hard to ignore one of the fastest grow­ing mar­kets, and the poten­tial for rev­enue for small and large busi­ness­es alike. The next time you’re swip­ing away on your phone, per­haps you’ll appre­ci­ate just how big those lit­tle app icons are.

Sources:

Nielsen Online

App Devel­op­ers Alliance

“The Mobile Move­ment Study,” Google/Ipsos OTX MediaCT

“Sav­ing Time and Mon­ey with Mobile Apps,” SBE Council