Consumers are increasingly turning to friends, social networks, ads, or recommendation engines to discover mobile applications rather than sorting through the thousands of mobile apps available. Because of this, research firm Gartner predicts that through 2018, less than 0.01 percent of consumer mobile apps will be considered a financial success by their developers. That’s less than one in 10,000.
“The vast number of mobile apps may imply that mobile is a new revenue stream that will bring riches to many,” says Ken Dulaney, VP and analyst at Gartner. “However, most mobile apps are not generating profits and many are not designed to generate revenue, but rather are used to build brand recognition or are just for fun. Application designers who do not recognize this may find profits elusive.”
Dulaney calls the mobile application market “hyperactive” — with more than 200 vendors developing mobile application development platforms and millions of developers using these products and open-source tools to build mobile applications.
To make matters worse, the bounty of good, free mobile apps has set high expectations for what should be paid for. Gartner forecasts that by 2017, 94.5 percent of downloads will be for free apps. Of paid applications, about 90 percent are downloaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 a day. Gartner says this is only going to get worse in the future when there will be even greater competition, especially in successful markets.
By 2017, the browser on mobile endpoint devices will be used as a sophisticated application delivery platform, with 50 percent of new Web apps involving complex client-side JavaScript, predicts Gartner. The company says that HTML5 will be the best option for a widely available, platform-neutral application delivery technology that is able to deliver sophisticated applications with a good-quality user experience. However, because developers will be challenged by issues like performance, fragmentation and immaturity, they should be aware of vendors trying to lock them in to platform-specific browser features.
Enterprises: ease up on app and device management
Gartner also predicts that by 2016, 20 percent of enterprise bring your own device (BYOD) programs will fail due to enterprise deployment of mobile device management (MDM) measures that are too restrictive.
“The use of consumer technologies in the work environment presents a threat to IT control of endpoint computing resources,” says Gartner’s Dulaney. “Given the control that IT has exercised over personal computers by developing and deploying images to company-managed PCs, many IT organizations will implement strong controls for mobile devices.”
Many IT departments are already rushing to deploy MDM solutions to address BYOD because of the rapid increase in the use of personal computing devices in the workplace. But as BYOD programs proliferate, employees are becoming increasingly aware of the ability for IT organizations to access their personal information, says Gartner. As a result, employees are becoming sensitive to giving IT organizations access to personal devices, so they are demanding solutions that isolate personal content from business content and restrict the ability of the IT organization to access or change personal content and applications.
More detailed analysis is available in the report “Predicts 2014: Mobile and Wireless.” The report is available on Gartner’s website.
