A new study from ABI Research reveals that the worldwide application industry is well on its way to achieve 44 billion cumulative downloads by 2016.
“Given the vast number of choices available, App developers and app stores need to innovate continually in order to maintain consumers’ interest,” said ABI research analyst Fei Feng Seet.
He added, “For example, an app called OfferedApp promises to provide a paid app each day in exchange for users completing a simple survey or signing up for an offer with advertisers. Some apps also offer virtual currency or other premiums to consumers who download a featured app from the developer. However these new marketing tactics are likely to face opposition as iTunes starts to clamp down on such incentivised promotions when they cut into Apple’s revenue from in-app sales.”
The iTunes is also rumoured to have made modifications to its App Store ranking algorithm. The new ranking system takes into account qualitative information such as reviews, on top of download statistics.
According to practice director Neil Strother of ABI research, “App store browsing on devices has been an issue with users, who can face difficulty finding an app of interest. Having many ‘misleading’ apps hogging the top charts for a week at a time does not help either, so this could not be a better time for Apple to reform its app ecosystem in an environment where competition and consumers’ heightened expectations are increasing the pressure.”
Applications business is a fairly new one, and a phenomenon which has taken everyone by surprise due to the tremendous growth it has seen in last couple of years. So the business models have not yet fully evolved, and therefore chances of companies loosing track is high.
What will be required is continuous effort from the entire eco-system to keep tweaking business models, user interface and type of apps based on the changing user preference and keep experimenting to discover this preference.