According to a study on mobile app marketplaces by IHS, Apple’s App Store is still far ahead of the competition in terms of revenue and share, but it’s apparently reaching a saturation point where growth has become slower than competitors like the Android Market and BlackBerry App World. The chart above, in fact, seems to prove that the App Store is sporting a 131.9% year-over-year growth, unlike Google’s platform that’s steadily growing at a 861.5% rate.
In January, Apple announced 10 billion apps had been downloaded from its App Store, which features 350,000 apps for iPhone and more than 60,000 for iPad. None of the competitors have similar numbers, but especially Android is growing faster thanks to the variety of devices available and the amount of units sold every month.
Looking forward, IHS expects the global market for mobile apps to rise by another 81.5 percent this year, reaching $3.9 billion in total sales. The Android Market and other rival stores are likely to further slice away at Apple’s leading share, but the iPhone maker will still take home at least half of all sales generated from the app store market through 2014.
So far, 2011 seems to be the year of new features in Apple’s App Store. In January the company launched the Mac App Store and earlier this week they introduced subscriptions for iOS apps – which will allow consumers to easily subscribe to content using their iTunes account. [CNET via Engadget]
