Mobile apps Revolution

The mobile apps revolution is here. Market research firm Gartner estimates that this year alone, mobile users across the globe will pay more than $6.2 billion to buy 'mobile applications' -- games, social networking tools, productivity and entertainment-based mini programmes for mobile phones.

And this despite the fact that 80 per cent of these will be free downloads anyway this year.

Apps have become the business with the fastest turnaround time in the software industry. In just one month an application can be developed and marketed to a global community of enthusiastic downloaders.

Sample this. In January this year, 3 billion apps were downloaded from the Apple app store, which has more than 100,000 titles in categories such as games, business, news, sports and health.

BlackBerry App World has around 4,000 titles and Google's Android Market, 20,000.

Little wonder, then, that mobile app developers, a non-existent breed just five years ago, are crawling out of the woodwork. Students, teachers, even doctors have jumped into the fray, competing with career software professionals.

In India, the world's second biggest mobile phone market of more than 500 million consumers and a large community of software programmers, there is fierce competition among developers to deliver apps that run on different handsets and technology platforms.

What's driving their business are online app stores on the Apple, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson websites, and on Facebook and Orkut, where developers can sell directly to consumers. Of course, they must pay a yearly fee and 30 per cent of their revenues to the service platform.

But this is a better scenario -- there was a time when app developers earned a paltry 10-15 per cent as royalty from mobile service providers.