It’s no secret that the global app market is growing at an increasing speed, and the latest research conducted by a British consulting company Ovum only further reinforces that claim. According to the said company, the worldwide app market will more than double its revenue in the next four years, i.e. experience more growth than it has since 2008 and the launch of first Android smartphones. To put it differently, Ovum predicts the market will make three times as much money between 2016 and 2020 than it has in the period from 2008 and 2015. The year of 2020 is also when the company estimates the mobile market will reach its peak in mature markets like Western Europe and the US. By then, it’s predicted that these markets will experience app saturation and a huge increase in user acquisition costs which will consequently lead to a declining number of downloads throughout the year.
The global app market is expected to grow to around $80 billion by 2020 at 2.2 times faster rate than it did in 2015 when it was worth around $36 billion. Naturally, app download volumes are also expected to increase but at a slower rate. Specifically, Ovum estimates that four years from now, people all over the world will complete around 378 billion downloads, which is 1.8 times more than the 211 billion figure achieved last year. Not unexpectedly, these predictions are mostly based on the expected growth of emerging markets, both in terms of revenue and download volumes. Regardless of that, it’s still expected that mature markets will earn the largest amount of global app period in the next four years, which seems like a realistic prediction. China, in particular, will make a ton of money as its revenue growth will soon become the fastest in the world. A good portion of that is attributed to its robust mobile games industry given how the majority of global app revenue comes directly from mobile games.
All in all, the next four years will be an interesting period for the mobile app industry. With the user acquisition costs constantly going up, there’s no time like the present to try to make money in the industry before it becomes so saturated that only the most innovative and funded products manage to succeed. Luckily for aspiring mobile app developers, there are already plenty of smart ways to boost app revenue.