According to Gartner, an estimated 4.5 million mobile applications are set to be downloaded in 2010. Consumers are expected to spend $6.2 billion on apps over the period.
Other finding highlighted that 82 per cent of all downloads will be free and advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide for the year.
In addition to this, Gartner has forecasted that worldwide downloads in mobile applications stores will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years with downloads expected to surpass 21.6 billion by 2013.
Worldwide mobile application store download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion in 2009 and is expected to grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013
Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner, commented on the latest findings.
“As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads,” she said.
“Games remain the number one application, and mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money.”
Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner, said that application stores will be a main focus of the mobile phone industry in 2010.
“Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry and applications themselves will help determine the winner among mobile devices platforms,” she said.
“Consumers will have a wide choice of stores and will seek the ones that make it easy for them to discover applications they are interested in and make it easy to pay for them when they have to. Developers will have to consider carefully not only which platform to support but also which store to promote their applications in.”