Apple dominates mobile applications store segment

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 20 January 2010 06:02

Opinion and Analysis

Don't believe what you may have seen elsewhere: Gartner's figures don't say Apple owns 99+% of the mobile applications market.

According to the Gartner report "Application Stores; The Revenue Opportunity Beyond the Hype" prepared by Stephanie Baghdassarian and Carolina Milanesi, there were 2.516 billion applications downloaded from the world's mobile applications stores during 2009.

Before you ask, that's free and paid downloads, with the former accounting for 1.987 billion of the total.

In early January 2010, Apple claimed downloads from its App Store totalled 3 billion. A year earlier, the claim was 500 million.

So that's basically 2.5 billion downloads for the year.

Round off Gartner's number for the total market, and you also get 2.5 billion.

So when it comes to mobile application stores, there's Apple, and so far behind you can hardly see them are the rest, such as Nokia's Ovi and the Android Marketplace.

That's far from being the whole story, so please read on.