With the smartphone market booming, people are trying new and innovative ideas to get an edge on the competition. One way to do this is by offering apps that let users do anything you can possibly think of. Apps may be categorized into many different forms, but we will focus more on the smartphone apps in this post. There are a couple of reasons why smartphone apps are so important. First, everyone thinks of a smartphone if the term”app” comes up. Second, apps have been synonymous with smartphones.
Defining an app
The term app is short for application. However, the definition has changed drastically since the revolution in smartphones brought by Apple, Inc. Now one can say an app is a very small, but specialized application that runs on smartphone platforms and performs very specific tasks. The idea of an app in a dedicated device started when cell phones were launched in the market. Smaller apps like calculator, alarms, and games were the only apps depending upon the phone. The real breakthrough in smartphone apps came when Apple introduced the iPhone with sophisticated hardware and incredible software to compliment it. Later Apple supplied software development kits (SDK) to developers to make their own apps. This really started the evolution as many other companies like Google, Microsoft and Blackberry started following the concept.
Statistics
Smartphones have completely changed how we live our normal daily lives. It is even been said that smartphones have reduced the amount of time consumers spend on their televisions, personal computers and even movie theaters. Apps have been part of the reason that smartphones are so much smarter and more capable. If we look at the statistics, there are 6 billion mobile subscribers around the world. That number equals 87 percent of the world’s population. It is remarkable to know that this number is the result of the market boom that took place only a decade ago.
The smartphone app market is considered a billion dollars market. We will try to talk about the two largest app markets in this post. The Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
There are currently 737,917 active apps in Apple App Store alone. This number is growing by 1000 apps a day. The current average price of each app is around $1.80. The following chart illustrates how numbers has changed over 4 years:
The Google Play Store has approximately 519855 apps that are active, with 389417 of these apps being free. The pie chart below gives a better idea of the distribution:
Growing at an extreme pace, these two apps markets are giants in the industry and constitute a combined total of over 1 billion apps available today to smartphone users.
These are only handful of apps, however these apps has completely changed the way we educate, entertain and communicate.
Recent Comments