ABI: Mobile app revenues will eclipse $30B by year's end

November 26, 2012 | By Jason Ankeny

Cumulative mobile application revenues are on pace to exceed $30 billion worldwide by the close of 2012, nearly double the total reached at year-end 2011, ABI Research reports.

The mobile app revenue base includes income generated from premium downloads, in-app purchases, in-app advertisements and subscriptions. "Consumers' high interest in apps has for long time been obvious from download volumes, but it's 2012 that will go down in history as the year when the economic side of the business finally took off," said ABI Senior Analyst Aapo Markkanen. "We're no longer talking only about a short-term gold rush. Apps have become a major digital industry."

While Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS remains the catalyst fueling the growth of the mobile app ecosystem, Markkanen also praised Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) recent efforts to improve monetization across its Android platform. "Google deserves a lot of credit for rehabilitating its proposition as an app distributor in the past year or so," Markkanen said. "If the old Android Market was a garage sale of the industry, then the new Google Play has begun resembling a respectable department store. We estimate the Android developers' share of the annual app revenues to set around one-third."

ABI adds that Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone and Research In Motion's (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry have also made mobile app monetization a key component of their respective platform strategies. "This means that if Windows Phone 8 or BlackBerry 10--or even both--manage to win the hearts and minds of the consumer, the threshold for developers to jump on the bandwagon won't be high," the firm said.

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