Gartner forecasts mobile app revenues to near $7 billion in 2010

Consumers worldwide will download about 4.51 billion mobile applications in 2010 according to a new forecast issued by research firm Gartner, up from 2.51 billion downloads last year. In conjunction with the increase in downloads, app store revenues will near $6.8 billion, up from $4.2 billion in 2009. Gartner anticipates that free applications will represent 82 percent of app store downloads in 2010, a number that will grow to 87 percent of downloads in 2013 even as expected revenues jump to $29.5 billion--Gartner estimates corresponding mobile advertising revenues will leap from $600 million in 2009 to about $7 billion in 2013 as developers embrace a host of mechanisms to subsidize their efforts.

Gartner contends that developers have little choice but to pin their hopes on mobile advertising, arguing that as smartphones continue to come down in price, the new wave of mass-market users will be reluctant to pay for mobile software. "Growth in smartphone sales will not necessarily mean that consumers will spend more money, but it will widen the addressable market for an offering that will be advertising-funded," Gartner research director Stephanie Baghdassarian said in a prepared statement. "The value chain of the application stores will evolve as rules are set and broken in an attempt to find the most profitable business model for all parties involved."

For more on the Gartner forecast:
- read this release [1]

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App store mania will further delay growth of browser-based applications [3]