Slashdot Mirror
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?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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!
speaking of which, https://medium.com/@timanglade...
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
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.
I guess they count people buying stuff on Amazon and AliExpress as 'in app purchases'.
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.