It is well known that smartphone applications are selling like hot cakes at the moment, Apple and Google being the companies that generate the most sales through the AppStore and Android Marketplace. A company Germany made an analysis of the revenues collected from the sale of applications and the results are quite impressive: in 2009, applications worth $1.8 billion were sold, and in the first half of 2010, applications were sold in value of $2.2 billion, so in the first half of this year the sales of applications reached and even surpassed the sales of the whole of last year.
The same company found that 3.1 billion applications were downloaded last year, and 3.8 billion were downloaded in the first half of this year. It is estimated that by 2013 the virtual application stores will grow, generating sales of up to $15 billion annually, so Apple/Google will obtain huge profits only from the sale of applications. At the same time, the same German company estimates that the number of smartphones will increase 10 times by 2013, from the current 100 million to 1 billion.
The future sounds good for developers and smartphone companies, but for us users, is there anything good in all this development? The prices of phones are increasing from year to year, while wages are stagnant because of the "crisis", and I doubt that Apple or Google will have as high sales if they do not adjust their prices according to the actual reality.
