There are other reasons, too, why native applications might no longer be the perfect solution for customer engagement. These app giants aren’t going anywhere anytime soon – but the viability and diversification of the native application market as a whole has stagnated, and for businesses smaller than Facebook, this is a critical fact that cannot be ignored.Ī languishing and difficult to penetrate market should be a serious consideration for a business deciding whether to commit time and investment to developing a native application. However, it is dominated by key players like Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp. The mobile application market on average is arguably still strong. The app market is dominated by a few big players (source: App Annie 2019) In fact, adults download as few as one or less applications per month, on average. The total number of application downloads could be a skewed picture too, as much of this figure could be children downloading games. And when you look more closely at which applications are really used, it is revealed that as much as 80% of time spent using applications is spent in mobile games or on Facebook or Facebook-owned apps. But despite the huge volume of downloads, most consumers only use about nine applications per day. Is mobile application use plateauing?īy 2019, the number of native applications downloaded annually reached 204 billion.

In 2012 Google amalgamated Android Market, Google Music, and Google Books, into Google Play.

By July 2008, Apple’s App Store was live and third-party application development was catapulted to the fore. Then, the launch of the BlackBerry 5810 heralded in “qwerty” keyboards and the phone enabled wireless email access.įast forward to June 2017, when Apple launched its first iPhone which shipped with Maps and Weather applications.

Nokia’s popular Snake game was even an application. The first smartphone, IBM’s Simon, was launched in 1994 and shipped with pre-installed applications like Calculator, Mail, and Note Pad.

One mobile market apps