GEC NEWS WIRESays Less Than 0.01 Percent of Consumer Mobile Apps Will Be Considered a Financial Success by Their Developers Through 2018
Consumers are increasingly turning to recommendation engines, friends, social networking or advertising to discover mobile applications rather than sorting through the thousands of mobile apps available. As a consequence, Gartner, Inc. predicts that through 2018, less than 0.01 percent of consumer mobile apps will be considered a financial success by their developers.
“The vast number of mobile apps may imply that mobile is a new revenue stream that will bring riches to many,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, our analysis shows that most mobile applications are not generating profits and that many mobile apps are not designed to generate revenue, but rather are used to build brand recognition and product awareness or are just for fun. Application designers who do not recognize this may find profits elusive.”
Dulaney described the mobile application market as “hyperactive” with more than 200 vendors developing mobile application development platforms and millions of developers using these products and open-source tools to build mobile applications. In addition, the bounty of good, free mobile apps has set high expectations for what should be paid for.
Gartner outlined two additional key predictions around mobility which include that by 2016, 20 percent of enterprise bring your own device (BYOD) programs will fail due to enterprise deployment of mobile device management (MDM) measures that are too restrictive and by 2017, the browser on mobile endpoint devices will be used as a sophisticated application delivery platform, with 50 percent of new Web apps involving complex client-side JavaScript.
