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The App Economy Will Be Worth $6 Trillion in Five Years (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In five years, the app economy will be worth $6.3 trillion, up from $1.3 trillion last year, according to a report released today by app measurement company App Annie. What explains the growth? More people are spending more time and -- crucially -- more money in apps. While on average people aren't downloading many more apps, App Annie expects global app usership to nearly double to 6.3 billion people in the next five years while the time spent in apps will more than double. And, it expects the average app spend -- including app-store purchases, advertising spend and, most importantly, commerce -- to increase from $379 per person to $1,008 in 2021. The 800-pound -- or $6 trillion -- gorilla in the room is mobile commerce.
Will that appy apps are apper appy app guy finally have something relevant to say in response to this?
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I can see a few here and there for functions you need or want but I can't see people spending 3x-10x more in apps in the future.
Modern app appers app other apps using apps, NOT LUDDITE software!
Apps!
...especially because of apps like NipAlert and SeeFood.
We'll make great pets
There's an app for that.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Unless apps become available to the very poorest and also the people who don't want to use apps, over 90% of the world using apps is impossible.
Money, please!
I need to buy an app, can someone recommend one?
How is this different from any other article that amounts to vapid sensationalism?
While there is definitely room to grow, it's not in markets which are already developed - North America & the EU, for example, have pretty high market penetration for 'apps' - to the point where many homeless in the US have phones with 'apps'.
Expanding into high population areas like China (and the rest of Asia) will certainly help growth - but just because there are more users does not mean a poor farmer in China or India has the ability to pay the same amount of money as a poor farmer in the US or EU.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
How do you make money on apps? The only thing I can see, is selling your App-writing skills to a big company, which then distributes it for free to the end-user.
I also don't like the word "app". What is wrong with "application" or "program"? Those words were just fine. *sigh* Now, get off my lawn!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
No, the app "economy" won't be worth nearly that much. If anything, we can expect a downturn sometime in the next few years to trim the excess bloat in a similar fashion to the dotcom bubble. On an unrelated side note, the Amazon Wholefoods merger is the AOL Time Warner merger of this decade.
Seconded. It's like the story that there'll be 27 trillion twitter accounts by next Wednesday.
I propose a rule: before suggesting that "the market for foo will be X" ... or "there will be Y number of bar", divide it by 7 billion. Then ask yourself if you can reasonably imagine one person buying/eating/having that quantity.
There should be a name for this. Malthus' quotient?
P.S. The speilchucker suggested Maltese or Maltose. Does anyone know of one for Firefox that has a vocabulary better than a typical nine-year-old?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe the author of the article got married today
Apps are stupid. Most the same can be done through regular web pages (http/html/dom/js). Improve the bookmarking and perhaps page caching options* if they want web sites/services to act like apps, but otherwise installing software is 1990's, and a security risk.
* Allow a page to check with the server to see if a newer version exists, otherwise cache the page and JS libraries for up to say a week for quicker access. And allow the user to set the upper limit of cache size and time per site so that greedy sites cannot hog too much cache. The defaults should be relatively low. If you are using fat libraries, you are doing it wrong.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, maybe they're using healthcare logic:
We already pay $60,000/year for the generic version of some drugs -- and those drugs were priced at $19k/year while they were still patent protected in 1997. It's insane, but yes, prices have gone up several hundred percent for an old and outdated drug. The market has reached the point where instead of trying to undercut the competition, a company will raise its prices to match the competitor's. And the same is true for surgeries, X-Ray's, hospital stays, doctor visits, etc.
By that logic, we'll soon shovel over $10 to use an unmaintained app which cost $1 when it was released in 2007.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
There's an app for that: http://www.app-cow.com/
Table-ized A.I.
I guess they count people buying stuff on Amazon and AliExpress as 'in app purchases'.
.. usage was even close to those numbers.
I use zero now and don't see a need coming in the next five years.
Your sig here!
If they're just counting money spent on buying apps, then I'm 100% with you.
If they're also counting in-app purchases and money spent via apps, then it could add up. Think people ordering fast food, buying stuff from Amazon and eBay, Uber rides etc etc.
And a quick look at the article; "And, it expects the average app spend — including app-store purchases, advertising spend and, most importantly, commerce — to increase from $379 per person to $1,008 in 2021." So they are indeed counting those things, that's "commerce". So it's not so crazy at all; we're mostly talking about money people already spend, only they'll increasingly be buying the same products and services through apps rather than traditional means, that's all.
Oh no... it's the future.
Ever notice people are so lazy to say the whole words like Phil, Tim, Al, Liz, Matt, pee, poop, doc, TV, Steve, Josh, Dave, etc.? These days, people type like "How r u?" :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
... that in 5 years, $6.3 trillion dollars will only be worth what $1.3 trillion is worth now?
I agree with you wholeheartedly. But the people publishing the article isn't measuring based on those measurement. They are measuring the market not based on how much product is bought and sold. They are measuring two possible things.
1) The market cap value... meaning that how much are the idiots who actually need help from a guy in a blue shirt to logon to his iTune account willing to gamble on the stock market. Consider that the companies making apps and the stocks are totally unrelated, we've moved past gambling on company performance and things like sales and now gamble on whether the stock will go up or down. Yes that's right. Stocks have nothing meaningful to do with a company. Instead, it's about someone making enough noise to generation trading volume which will naturally make the stock go up or down. Those e-mails that go out with stock tips (spam) actually are far more effective at making shares go up or down than CEOs today. Write a script which will buy and sell $10 worth of a share once a minute based only on those e-mails and you can actually be a REALLY successful trader these days. It's because it works more often than it doesn't. Because those idiots are using market manipulation to drive the share value up. And it works... but sadly, it also increases the cost of a loaf of bread and liter of milk far faster than salaries increase.
2) Trickle effect. So, Company A sells 10 million copies of a game for $10 million and that company pays employees, rent, etc... and the local businesses strengthen and receive $5 million (after all the taxes) of that $10 million etc... Then those businesses spend that money and it's $4 million after taxes (lower tax brackets) etc... So the same $10 million was spent 15 times as a direct result of the original $10 million. Also add that during bank transfers of the money, no real money exchanges and there's math to create more money as it goes along... creating more wealth... and making $7/hour worth even less.
I think when they said "worth" they meant "valued at". The combined worth of apps to the global economy is in the negative.
Some software actually helps produce, but 6 trillion bucks worth of apps is gonna hard to justify as "worth" anything near that.
A bunch of vigorous activity, but doesn't actually produce any beef...shoes...steel...tires...tortillas...whatever.
funny money.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
folks aren't spending $6 trillion on Pokemon Go. I'm guessing they mean Uber and the like. That's not the App Economy. That's the 21st century equivalent to sharecropping, the company store, or whatever other abusive employee-employer relationship you care to name. Using folks weak understanding of technology to get away with skirting minimum wage and benefits laws is not an economy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I accept a multi-trillion dollar valuation about as well as the average Shark Tank investor.
Netflix offers an app. Is Netflix revenue based on app usage counted as "app" revenue, but not counted when a browser interface is used? How about Amazon? Nest? Your local grocery store app?
This entire valuation is utter bullshit. I could do the same thing and claim the Chrome browser market is now worth trillions because it happens to be a popular interface for people to buy things with and create revenue.
It is crazy. If my bank has an app that allows me to pay my mortgage through it, my house isn't being paid for with app money. We didn't have a special "telephone economy" when people called in mail order purchases. We didn't have a special "mobile browser economy" when e-commerce sites rolled out mobile browsers. The only major shifts were mail order, which removed the need for physical contact, and e-commerce, which broke from the physical catalog interface (electronic ordering was just an incremental upgrade of the mail order model). Everything since then is just rearranging the deck chairs. If eBay/Amazon/etc. didn't have apps, people would just use the mobile browsers interface or the desktop browser interface. It's like faxing in an order from a catalog vs. calling it in; slightly different interface, no functional difference. There's no more money being made, no opportunity for some upstart like Amazon to come in and change the marketplace. You can count the upstarts as part of the app economy, but not the existing business getting shifted to a spiffy new interface. My bank account doesn't magically become app money when I install the bank's app.