Juniper is a research firm that regularly puts out 5-year forecasts, which it then varies equally regularly with new 5-year forecasts. So following on from the app vs web debate, Juniper rides to the rescue of the app world with its latest (well, not so fresh anymore really), predicting a not so modest $25 bn industry from mobile applications by 2014. There you have it, Google…
The big hockey stick will kick in from 2011 and it will come from value-added services rather than revenues from one-off downloads. Games will remain the biggest
So with this I wholeheartedly agree (as I pointed out here): the sector went from innovation through handsets to innovation through apps and is starting to enter innovation through services. If it will be a $25bn market in 5 years time, I don’t know. But then: the report is from April, so maybe they have varied it since.
The underlying rationale however is correct: mobile applications are merely a facilitator for the delivery of services to mobile devices, and there lies a lot of revenue hidden. So upwards, onwards!