By Telecom
Lead Team: Annual revenues from consumer mobile applications will touch $52
billion by 2016 as consumer smartphone adoption accelerates with the emergence
of a mass tablet market.
Global app
revenues from the tablets will increase from 7 percent to 25 percent by 2016
and smartphones will continue to comprise the majority of app revenues.
Additionally,
most network operator storefronts will struggle to attract developers due to
lack of scale.
More than 31 billion apps downloaded to mobile devices in 2011,
according to Juniper Research.
The
introduction of operator billing across leading storefronts such as the Android
Market and Ovi Store had led to a dramatic rise in revenues. Likewise, the mass
deployment of in-app billing options meant that, for many storefronts, post-download
revenues had surpassed those of PPD (Pay-Per-Download).
The app store
model faced the prospect of erosion in the longer term as HTML5. Additionally,
the closer integration between web-based apps and handsets should mean that the
advantage that native apps have is reduced.
This in turn
offers great opportunities for content publishers to offer content on-site
rather than be reliant on storefront distribution, the report added.
“While
we are likely to see some larger media publishers — particularly those
dependent on subscription revenues — migrating to a direct-to-consumer model
(D2C), this is by no means true for the majority of companies. Most do not
possess the scale of traffic to make D2C a viable option: in most cases, the
storefront will continue to be the optimal discovery and distribution
mechanism,” said Windsor Holden, author of Mobile Apps Stores: Future
Business Models & Ecosystem Analysis 2012-2016 at Juniper.