Mobile Apps are Boosting the Adoption of Smartphones

According to the latest Nielsen data on smartphones, the pace of adoption continues to ramp up. In May, 38% of consumers with mobile phones owned a smartphone, the research firm says. That figure was 19% in the third quarter of 2009 and 31% in Q3 2010. Nielsen projects by the end of this year half of mobile phones in use will be smartphones.

The high penetration of smartphones offers huge potential for mobile application development companies and of course an increased competition. According to some experts, the mobile app developers are the bases of the smartphones boom. "CEO, Forrester Research says "Apple sales may grow more than 50% in the next two years as mobile apps boom raise demand for iDevices like iPhone and iPad." My opinion is that the "mobile apps boom" raises demand not only for iDevices, but also for smartphones in general.

The two leading mobile platforms nowadays are Apple’s iOS and Google’s open source Android. The fact that the second one, which is the younger, is an open source naturally makes it preferred by the mobile app developers. The latest researches show that Google's Android is still the favorite among mobile application developer community, ahead of Apple's iOS ecosystem.

The 2011 edition of the VisionMobile Developer Economics survey found that 67 per cent of mobile application development companies polled are working with the Google platform, compared to 59 per cent in 2010. The advantage helped Android to maintain its lead over iOS, which rose from 50 to 59 per cent over the period. Researchers noted that the huge market presence of iOS and Android helped the platforms stay at the forefront for mobile application developers.

According to the report, there are more than 350,000 iOS applications currently on the market, while Android apps are more than 200,000. About 25 per cent of the apps on the Apple App Store are free, while Android Market offers 57 per cent of free apps. However, experts believe the huge gap will close as the Android market matures.

The mobile web platform has made some of the biggest strides in the market. The study found that 56 per cent of mobile application development companies are working on mobile web applications, while just a year ago the number of mobile app developers was just 40 per cent. Additionally, researchers believe that the familiarity mobile application developers have with writing code in HTML and JavaScript allows for a faster transition to mobile web application development.

A Flurry report shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption. This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms. The figures show that users in US spent 81 minutes per day in June 2011 using mobile apps, compared to 43 minutes in June 2010.

All the numbers above clearly show that it worth being a mobile application developer nowadays. Mobile app developers are simultaneously boosting the acceleration of smartphone penetration and benefiting from the increasing demand for new and more sophisticated mobile applications.

If you are looking for a mobile application developer, make certain you spend descent amount of time researching for the right one. Your mobile app developer should possess not only technology expertise, but understanding of the mobile environment.