Market

Gartner sees smartphone market volume growing a whopping 46 percent from 172.4 million sold last year, boosted by cheaper models. The most affordable now cost just over $100 excluding operator subsidies.

link: Handset market rebounding in 2010: report - Yahoo! News

Anyone modeling iPhone growth this year below 50% is implying Apple will lose share.

If Apple maintains market share (about 15%) it would sell about 37 million iPhones in 2010. Apple grew iPhone unit sales about 84% from 2008 to 2009.

Total Apps Approved: 180534

Total Available Apps: 161262

In related news: the total number of apps on the Android Market is now almost 30,000.

Sources: appshopper.com, androidlib.com

Click on image above (1.7MB .png file)

There are 193 recognized sovereign states, so they’re about half way there...

App Store now supports Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda.

Coming soon: Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/countries/

According to 148apps.biz there are 823 apps being submitted to the app store every day for the month of February. If it’s maintained this will be a new record, beating the 821 apps per day for last December.

This rate implies 300k apps per year run rate. Of course, the submission rate has been increasing steadily so it might not be long before we see 1000 apps per day.

Source: 148apps.biz.

On a planet with around 6.8 billion people, we're likely to see 5 billion cell phone subscriptions this year.

http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/06.aspx

ITU expects to see the number of mobile broadband subscriptions exceed one billion globally during 2010, having topped 600 million by the end of 2009. With current growth rates, web access by people on the move — via laptops and smart mobile devices – is likely to exceed web access from desktop computers within the next five years.

Mobile broadband is a good proxy for mobile computing so it’s very likely that these 1 billion subs will use advanced devices if not smartphones per se.

When folks need an elevator, we should give them an elevator, not an airplane. We’ve been giving them airplanes for 30 years, and then laughing at them for being too stupid to fly them right.

I think we’re the stupid ones.

Read more: Funkatron.com

Taking the data released so far on the iTunes App Store and performing to usual regression analysis gives us a high degree of confidence that 300k apps will be achieved by end of this year and 500k well before the end of next year.

The app add rate is running at about 500 apps per day.

The graphs above show the total catalog and the app addition rate as reported by Apple and as estimated by 148apps.com.

The other useful data is that 148apps.com has had a pretty good record in tracking the catalog.

Apple just started its countdown clock to 10 billion song downloads.

I combined the data available for iTunes downloads of Songs and Apps (from Wikipedia) in the graphs above.

Obviously, the App download rate is increasing (i.e apps are accelerating more rapidly) than songs. Both are averaging about 10 million units per day over the past 3 months.

A Download Totals graph also shows the acceleration plainly with the App Store getting to 3 Billion downloads in 19 months vs. 36 months for Songs. A curve-fitting analysis shows that the App store will reach 10 billion downloads 27 months after launch or around October 2010.

The same analysis shows that the App Store will overtake the Music Store in total units downloaded in December 2010 when they both reach around 13.5 billion downloads.

Comscore revealed their latest survey resultsfor the US mobile subscriber market. From the latest data and the data previously released in October we can put together a few insights.

The number of smartphone users increased by 3.2 million, growing at over 1 million new users per month.

Apple and Android added about 1 million users each. RIM added 1.4 million with Symbian adding about 200k users. Palm lost 441k users and Microsoft lost about 44k users.

Non-smartphones lost 2.1 million users and 1 million subscribers were added to the top line.

The non-smartphones lost 1% share in the quarter and 6% since February. Smartphones make up 17% of all users.

Google has overtaken Symbian to rise from last place in the platform installed base and is closing on Palm.

At 5% share erosion per year, the non-smartphone market will completely disappear in about 14 years, though I feel 10 years is a more likely target with 5 years until the market is 50% penetrated.

I wanted to check how popular the App Store was for the world's brands. As a quick experiment, I went through the first 100 names in the Forbes 1000 list (ranked by Revenues) and found that 37 had some app store presence.

I then went through the next 100 and found that 61 out of top 200 companies had applications.

Finally, I went through the Interbrands top 100 brands of 2009 and found that 57 were officially promoted on the App Store.

What perhaps is telling is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are some companies that have multiple apps with sub-brands also listed.

The real question is not which brands are on the store, but why aren’t all of them there.