Apps and the app industry have seen a lot of news coverage, lately. From app developers showing 100 percent transparency about their numbers to reports being released on the Apple App economy.

But a lot of the growth this market will probably see still lies more or less far ahead of us, starting in 2010, but probably seeing strong growth until 2013 or even further. The most recent attempts in predictions where the market is going come from Gartner.

Regarding App Store revenues and downloads, Gartner foresees:

• 2010: 4.5 billion apps downloaded, for a total of $6.8 billion in revenue

• 2013: 21.6 billion apps will be downloaded, for a total of $29.5 billion in revenue

 
Download Free/Paid-ratio:

• 2010: 3.7 billion (82%) free app downloads and about 800 million (18%) paid downloads

• 2013: 18.8 billion (87%) free app downloads and 2.8 billion (13%) paid app download

 
Just by looking at these numbers, one would think that free is the way to go. And maybe that is so. The question, then, remains where all the revenue will come from. Gartner splits its revenue predictions between end-user spending and advertising revenue as follows:

• 2010:  about $6.2 (91%) billion in end-user spending and 600 million (9%) in advertising revenue

• 2013: about $23 billion (78%) in end-user spending and 6.5 (22%) billion in advertising revenue

 
First of all, these numbers imply that in-app advertising (as part of mobile advertising) is pretty big business.  The fact that many big players in the mobile space are positioning themselves to take a piece of that market right now (Google/Abmob, Apple/Quattro and Opera/AdMarvel) further substantiates this.

It also means that for any app-developer and mobile publisher, there is a chance to create a profitable business out of advertising revenues. This will probably work better for some then for others, but, in our opinion, it is a pretty save bet that mobile advertising is here to stay.

Furthermore, although Gartner does not further go into detail about “end-user spending”, it is clear that up-sale (full versions, extra levels, virtual goods etc.) will make up a large part of end-user spending. So again, for many app-developers (especially in gaming) this may be the way to go.

And of course, for “some”, simply selling the app is an option as well.

As an opinion, a market seeing such a strong growth within just a few years will probably look completely different from what it is looking like right now. New means of increasing end-user spending will pop up, supporting industries and sectors (payments, for example) will pop-up. Furthermore App Store themselves will evolve as competition between them increases (more openness might be a consequence of this).

As a bottom line, the study (even if far off) implies something we believe is very true: apps in general are big business.

And we are glad to be part of it.

Great news today, we just received official notice that we are among 50 finalists (out of 250) that have been nominated for the Mobile Premier Awards on the 15th of February. Each nominee was chosen by a MobileMonday chapter, in our case it was Hamburg. German-speaking readers, read this.

Out of the remaining 50, 20 will be chosen to present at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A jury will decide on the finalists by the end of January. The jury is going to mainly use our profile on dotopen.com – so please check it out and let us know how we could improve it. We are adding a slide deck soon.

Let’s hope we’re among the last 20!

We have recently gone live with the ‘Performance Network’, our affiliate network for iPhone apps and must say that it is off to quite a good start – not only because GoMo News and Mobile Marketing Magazine wrote about us (thank you). Although we do not want to reveal any numbers yet, developer registrations have clearly taken off these last days.

For those of you wondering why they cannot enter the Performance Network on apprupt.com, this area will be available as soon as your app is live on the App Store with our tracking library included. You will then be able to see reports for your app(s) as well a check your account balance and complete payments.

Furthermore, the new year will bring some changes to this blog. We will do less posts a week and try to cover a less broad range of topics and more information coming with each post. We want this blog to be helpful as a source of guidance and information on a few topics, but not as an app-news ticker.

These are the topics we want to focus on:

• App Marketing: Statistics and numbers (conversions etc.), experiences (channels) and outlooks (trends)
• Product Marketing: General marketing trends an how they might relate to mobile apps
• Market data: trends and stats
• apprupt: anything concerning ourselves, from new features to official announcements

 
We are looking to an exciting 2010 for mobile and for apprupt – so stay tuned!

Where will you be in 2020 and what will your life look like? Such a question seems almost impossible to answer, especially when looking at the speed and acceleration of innovation throughout the last decade. In the beginning of 2008, for example, nobody really knew about mobile apps. At best, the bulk of consumers knew about downloadable “programmes” for mobile phones, most of which were games. Just two years later apps seem to be everywhere, not only for the iPhone but as a topic in blogs, among entrepreneurs and even mainstream media.

Despite the difficulty of making sophisticated predictions about the future, Rudy De Waele, mobile expert, co-founder of dotopen and blogger at m-trends.org put together an impressive list of people to write down their trends for the coming decade.

The aggregated list is quite extensive, so here goes our short-list of trends we find most important in general and with reference to app developers and mobile publishers. Some of the following are freely interpreted and commented – hopefully they still display the intended meaning:

• We’re all value creators – the notation here is that value creation and exchange will be democratized, collaboration and co-creation in real time become vital as we move forward to the next billion of Internet users
• App businesses – by 2011/2012 we will see $100m/yr businesses built on apps
• App Stores will open up – less restrictions, more user/developer control.
• Powerful mobile devices will cost less – dramatically increasing the number of people with access to the Internet. Also, data plans will become cheaper.
• More than 50% of the word’s households will carry a mobile device – that’s roughly 3 billion. Just imagine that.
• The mobile browser becomes the main applications platform – no more native apps? We are not so sure about that.
• Mobile phones as remotes – TVs, cars, everything.
• Mobile Gaming – browser gaming (including mobile) pretty much replaces the current console market in the western world.
• Things and services – the connection between online services and physical devices will keep increasing. This will cause a need for new applications that help us make use of all our personal data. Think Foursquare or CitySourced as early examples of this.
• Data and things – things will generate more data traffic than the average human.
• Daily data – already, the Internet knows a lot about us. This will dramatically increase with the mobile wave. As we learn to „create and manipulate“ this data, we will learn to value personal information that stays personal.
• Privacy and “always-on” backlash or “the value of being offline” – with increased personal data and visibility of our everyday activities, privacy will be a big issue and a challenge for new services to handle and solves these. Furthermore, as a reaction to always being connected, people will pay for the ability to be offline – going ’dark’ and to disconnect will become a USP for certain products and services.
• Mobile Advertising and “ContVertising”– Advertisers will massively convert to mobile. New means of ad-targeting consumers (consumer interests) will lead to an increased relevance of consumer marketing – the combination of very high relevance and paid ads will be perceived as content rather than an intrusion. The improved possibilities will lead advertisers to move one third of their budgets to mobile. As part of this, the bulk of brands will use apps to increase brand awareness.
• Augmented reality, live information based on context and NFC – this was mentioned multiple times, though without many details to it. Bottom line: many products and services will make use of AR, it will be adding value to products and services and will be (a value proposition in) a big market. Receiving information based on live information of one’s environment and context will be possible and part of our every day life. Near Field Communication (NFC) will take off.
• Indoor smartness – intelligent environments and indoor positioning. This corresponds to the mentioned AR-Services, contextual relevance and NFC.
• Mobile payment and money transfer beyond mobile banking – pay everything with your mobile device (we should stop calling it a mobile phone, as if that were its main purpose or use case). No more need for a wallet.
• Mobile Commerce – will take off. In our opinion this is strongly connected to receiving contextually relevant information and connecting online with actual things.

 
If you find the time, go check out entire presentation, there are a lot more points in it that are worth a thought and we haven’t mentioned here.

Ortwin Gentz, seller of the app Where To? (the company’s name is FutureTap) today released some interesting numbers on his app business and its development since he purchased the app from tap tap tap about a year ago – his blog post was even picked up by Techcrunch.

Gentz bought the app for $70k and has so far made about $325k in gross sales, which leaves him with about $227k in sales after the Apple cut. Another interesting fact is that new versions and being featured by Apple actually seem to have caused a rather constant stream of sales, thus not the typical „few-weeks hit“.

In our opinion, the most interesting fact is that, just like we mentioned very early on in one of our blogposts, Gentz does not see that buying reach to increase app downloads is paying off for apps. Regarding any performance marketing, the calculation is very simple: pay less than you earn. But with regard to app revenues, click prices and available marketing inventory, so far, this only seems to work for very few apps.

So what bottom line do the FutureTap numbers leave us with? We think that on a general note regarding apps there are two things that need to change or that have to further develop in the future:

• Developers need more and better ways (channels) to market their app(s)

• Developers need more and different ways of monetizing existing users and traffic so that they can spend more on customer acquisition and sustain a profitable business

 
We see apprupt as a real alternative for developers to gain additional downloads without the usual marketing risk and without overpaying for customer acquisition – and we will keep improving and constantly work on the above named points.