Nick Jones

I’m sure everyone has noticed by now that Apple announced that their app store now contains 65,000 applications and has achieved 1.5 billion downloads in the last year. Numbers with lots of zeroes are always impressive, but what’s not just impressive but rather scary is to ask what this implies for the future. A user base of a few tens of millions of individuals with iPhone and iPod Touch gadgets have clicked the “download” button 1.5 billion times a year. Now Apple owners are in no sense average users so direct extrapolation of their behaviour to the rest of the world would be dubious. But let’s run the clock forward to, say, 2013. The installed base of handsets will be substantially more than 4 billion, smartphones still won’t be anywhere near the majority but some people with enhanced phones will be downloading apps as well. So we could easily be looking at a market where the appstores of the world collectively hold hundreds of millions of applications and every year I’d guess something of the order of 50 to 100 billion apps will be downloaded. Now those are really scary numbers. I wonder how long it will be before we see the first application that earns a billion euros?