Apple's iPhone and iPad to push app sales beyond $15bn in 2011 - Telegraph.co.uk

Downloads of popular games, such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump, are expected to lead to a near-tripling of global app sales, according to research firm Gartner.

Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner, said the big rise in expected sales from $5.2bn in 2010 was due to the popularity of the iPad and other tablet computers.

"Something massive has happened," she said. "It's called the iPad, and all of its little brothers and sisters and cousins that are copying Apple."

Ms Baghdassarian said apps are "by far" the fastest-growing sector of the telecoms and technology industry, and could eventually overtake money generated by phone calls.

Apple, which launched the first app store in the summer of 2008, still dominates the industry, controlling an estimated nine out of 10 of all app sales.

Last week Apple announced more than 10bn apps have been downloaded from its App Store, compared with 1bn downloaded via Google's Andorid Market.

Apple, and other app stores, collect 30pc of the retail price of all apps sold, with 70pc going to the software developers.

Several entrepreneurs have become millionaires from creating and selling apps. At one point in 2008 Joel Comm, a US internet marketer, was raking in more than $30,000 a day from his iFart app that makes a farting noise.

A festive version of Angry Birds, the addictive game in which players catapult animated birds into obstacles, is currently the biggest selling application in the UK.

Although most apps sell for less than £1, some can cost as much as $1,000. In August 2008, an application called I Am Rich, which simply showed a picture of a red ruby glowing on the iPhone's screen, was sold for $999.99

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Motorola Xoom as a test for life beyond the iPad

Is the iPad a one-hit wonder or will the tablet market take off broadly in 2011? That's the question Motorola's Xoom tablet will likely answer.

Motorola's Xoom may determine how real the broader tablet market is.

(Credit: Motorola)

And this broader market, of course, includes Hewlett-Packard's WebOS tablet and RIM's PlayBook, among others. But Motorola's Xoom stands as the biggest potential consumer rival to the iPad 2 because Motorola is a first-tier supplier that has already competed mightily against Apple in the smartphone market (think Droid) and, more importantly, packs in plenty of eagerly awaited goodies, including: Google's Android Honeycomb operating system for tablets, a powerful dual-core processor, a high-resolution (1,280x800) display, dual cameras, and lest we forget, the Verizon 3G (and soon-to-come 4G) network.

That said, tucked into a research note I received on Friday from Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, was this morsel: "The magnitude of tablet opportunity beyond Apple is unclear." And he also writes that "we believe that iPad volumes in the current quarter will dry up ahead of the iPad 2 launch."

So, will we see long lines at Verizon stores the day of launch, like the iPad? Or has the tablet novelty worn off enough that it's not a line-forming impulse-buy anymore? And/or is it principally a phenomenon linked to the cachet of Apple products?

Based on my own experience, I believe that the media tablet is more than a one-hit wonder. The sheer utility of my iPad has cut my laptop use almost in half, as I've written before. (And the iPad trumps my iPhone too, in a number of respects, like mapping.)

So, what kind of numbers do we need to see? Considering that the market is still nascent, that's a tough call. Kumar said that Apple shipped between 6 and 7 million iPads in the most recent quarter, "with the lower end (Wi-Fi) dominating the mix." With Apple as the high-water mark, we can't expect those kinds of numbers from Motorola initially.

Asia-based rumors claim Motorola is aiming to ship as many as 800,000 out of the gate and RIM a bit more. Those would be healthy numbers.

And Motorola appears to be doing all it can do to make interesting accessories, too--like this speaker dock and Bluetooth keyboard, among other add-ons.

Who knows, the tablet, in one form or another, could eventually make the laptop obsolete. That would result in huge, market-upending numbers. But I'll leave that highly-speculative analysis for next year.

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