There are currently close to 600,000 apps on iOS and 400,000 apps on Android. The growth of apps in the market place is showing no signs of slowing down. Far from it, iPhone App downloads were up 83% in November from last year. To help consumers find their way through these huge catalogs, many companies are now creating App search services – think Google search for Apps. That’s just one example of services that are appearing to support the emerging App ecosystem and there are many more. For example, some companies are providing BaaS facilities (Backend as a Service) such as Parse which claim to obviate the requirement of difficult server/cloud set up for App developers. Others are providing advertisement integration middleware or support for social gaming facilities such as OpenFeint. There’s also a lot of middleware companies springing up that provide libraries to help mobile cross platform development. And of course there are a number of mobile analytics solutions that are emerging.
As a high growth sector the App industry could be looked at as being crowded with lots of competition vying for respective niches. To a degree this is true, there is a lot of activity in the App world because of its high growth nature. However, it’s still early days and the years ahead are going to be full of disruption in the mobile middleware and service spaces. There are early market leaders in BaaS, advertising and analytics but there is no de-facto standards for operation as yet.
The App is no longer a novelty in itself. Apps need to ‘Level-Up’ in gaming terms. An App is simply software made easy to consume – sugarcoated software. What’s going to set quality Apps apart from the rest for 2012 and onwards is the value that they deliver. This is also the case for the App middleware and services ecosystem and also, I dare say, has been for the rest of the software industry since it began.
