Apple Dominates the Mobile App Market in 2009

The term “cell phone” used to mean one thing… a portable phone that used cellular towers to place a call. Today, the term almost seems defunct, because today’s phones do much, much more than place a simple call. Strangely enough, today’s phones seem to do that one single thing worse than phones from ten years ago, and if there’s a reason for it, it’s because the models we have today are designed to do more than ever.

At first, smart phones and the like came pre-equipped with various software packages, and while that’s all fine and good, there’s little room for customization. Then more robust models came out, and consumers for the first time were able to add their own applications at their leisure. I believe that the ability to add apps to a phone has existed for a while, but when it really took off is when Apple released the App Store as part of iTunes, for use with its iPods and iPhones.

To say that it “took off” would be an understatement, because even though the App Store has only been available for just over a year-and-a-half, it hit a staggering two billion downloads this past September, and at the rate it’s going, it’s set to hit 3 billion soon, and 4.5 billion by the end of the year. Of course, there are other app stores available for non-iPod/iPhone devices, so just how successful are those?

Well, take a look at this number: 99.4%. That represents the number of mobile app sales that belonged to Apple and its App Store during 2009. That’s a bit of a domination, right? So much so, that it seems pointless to even explore numbers of the competitors, but simple math would suggest that the numbers are low (I am one of those who hopes that changes in the future, though).

Thanks to these 2.5 billion apps on the App Store, a total of $4.2 billion in revenue has been brought in, and at the rate things are going, that number could rise to, get this, $29.5B by the end of 2013. Just think about it… that’s just for mobile apps, not the hardware!

Apple first opened the App Store in July 2008, along with the launch of the iPhone 3G and the release of iPhone OS 2.0. Sales were brisk, with 300 million apps sold by December. After the holidays, that number had jumped to 500 million. Earlier this month, Apple announced that sales had topped 3 billion; that means iPhone users downloaded 2.5 billion apps in 2009 alone. Gartner’s figures show another 16 million apps that could come from other platform’s recently opened app stores, giving Apple at least 99.4 percent of all mobile apps sold for the year.