A new report predicts that the combined value of paid apps, app-enabled purchases of goods and services, and in-app advertising will double in the United States by 2017.
According to information released by the new research division at AppNation, that means the current market worth of $72 billion will increase to $151 billion within the next four years.
AppNation founder and CEO Drew Ianni said:
Our research demonstrates that despite the massive popularity of apps and a saturated marketplace in the U.S., the overall growth rate in the app economy is still accelerating and will be until at least 2015. ...With the number of apps used per day by U.S. consumers still expanding, and as time spent on mobile devices shifts more to using apps versus other media, it is clear that there is still a lot of runway ahead across all key sectors of the app economy.
Paid downloads actually account for little of that revenue. The biggest contributor to the “app economy” by far is the app-enabled sales of physical goods and services, which accounted for about $45 billion of the nearly $60 billion total at the start of 2013. So far this year, that $60 billion total has increased to about $72 billion. Meanwhile, less than $1 billion of that value comes from paid app downloads. In-advertising revenue and virtual goods round out the cash contributors.
The research was gathered from a survey sent to 2,500 online customers in the United States and focused on platform adoption and intent, tablet and smartphone app discovery, tablet and smartphone app usage, cloud service usage, and feature desirability analysis of smart TVs.
Reticle Research principal analyst Ross Rubin, who co-authored the report, said, “Smartphones and tablets are driving the app economy today, but emerging platforms, such as connected cars and smart TVs, are providing new opportunities...”
Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, credits Apple’s enterprise with growing the app economy, saying the wide array of devices available today has spurred innovation and made it easier to market to a large audience of end-users. In fact, Apple’s App Store, which recently had its fifth “birthday,” has released 850,000 apps and shelled out more than $10 billion to their developers.
A recent study estimates that there are 752,000 app economy jobs—developing, maintaining, or supporting mobile applications—currently available in the United States, a number that increased about 40 percent in the past year. These economic and job predictions make the mobile app world a force to be realized.
