Mobile Apps have turned a corner in 2011.  You may not have noticed it, you may have missed the press releases, but it did happen.  Not just a statistical corner either.  In 2011, the Apple app store surpassed 500,000 apps available for download and over 10 billion individual downloads.   At the end of 2011, the Android Market had surpassed 400,000 apps with similarly impressive download counts around 10 billion.  Apps aren’t going anywhere but up – and here’s why…

Technology Platforms

A long long time ago (read: 5-6 years) Blackberry was the big player in the smart phone world.  Competing only with Palm, Blackberry stayed relevant and specific in no small part due to the creation of the Blackberry App World.  This gave software developers the ability to build applications to do the things they wanted, rather than the things the phone companies said they should.

Then came the iPhone and everything changed.  In June of 2007, the iPhone officially hit the market to rave reviews.  Push the hype to one side and you see that the iPhone success was largely due to three major factors: design and marketing, high quality hardware, and the App Store.  Copying the idea from Blackberry, Apple too the idea much further and enabled a new generation of capabilities both from a hardware standpoint (easily accessible GPS data, accelerometers, cameras, etc) and from a programming standpoint (Objective C is a language anyone can pick up with just a little study).

Bounding onto the scene like an overactive puppy, Android came just one year later to offer a major competitor to the iPhone and now commands a greater market share of devices and is rapidly gaining in the app downloads arenas too.

All this to say – technology has grown and become more commonplace, increasing the acceptance of the app concept and resulting in a higher level of audience awareness of the same.

Marketing

There are entire companies dedicated to the creation of mobile apps, and many a fortune has been made (and lost) in the realm of app development.  Apps are now marketed like any other product, software or hardware.  One of the most popular apps of all time is Angry Birds and now has television shows, plush toys, and tattoos available.  This high level of marketing has both increased sales of their respective apps, but also increased audience awareness of what apps are capable of, establishing a baseline understanding that makes understanding the value of other apps easier.

Ease of Development

With the growth of internet technologies that support data transfer, apps are becoming more and more capable, no longer limited by supporting systems – apps are growing at the rate of developer’s imaginations.  Many a research company has predicted that by the end of 2016, the vast majority of internet traffic will be a result of apps pushing and pulling data to and from other systems (such as Facebook, Picasa, LinkedIn, News Readers, etc).

All of these elements are coming together in 2012 to make 2012 the year of the app – there’s nothing stopping you but your imagination and finding a company to realize your dreams.  Let Web Teks help you make your app dreams a reality, contact us today!