According to a Gartner research report consumers will spend over USD$6.2 billion on mobile apps during 2010.

The report predicts downloads will crack 4.5 billion in 2010 – Apple served its three billionth download during 2009. Gartner predicts this to rise to 21.6 billion by 2013. Free downloads will make up 82% of those in 2010 and 87% in 2013.



“As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads… Games remain the number one application, and mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money,” said Gartner research director Stephanie Baghdassarian.

Mobile application stores download revenue crested USD$4.2 billion in 2009 and Gartner expects this to grow to USD$29.5 billion by year’s end 2013. Sponsored mobile apps will make up 25% of revenue by 2013, the report said.

“Application stores will be a core focus throughout 2010 for the mobile industry and applications themselves will help determine the winner among mobile devices platforms… Consumers will have a wide choice of stores and will seek the ones that make it easy for them to discover applications they are interested in and make it easy to pay for them when they have to. Developers will have to consider carefully not only which platform to support but also which store to promote their applications in,” added Carolina Milanesi, Gartner research director.