We will download 66bn apps a year by 2016 [Report]

Apps are everywhere. There are app stores, fuelling the app economy, which is part of the app ecosystem. It stands to reason that we must be downloading a lot of them then. But how many?

Millions? Hundreds of millions? Nope. Not even close. At the moment we’re downloading around 31-billion apps a year. Try and comprehend that. Now try and comprehend the fact that we look set to be downloading more than double that in four years’ time.

According to UK-based tech analysis company Juniper Research, people are expected to download 66-billion apps a year by 2016.

The majority of these downloads will be on smartphones, although the company says that one in four app downloads will be to tablets by 2016.

Juniper Research reckons that around 87% of these downloads will be for free apps, but that publishers will continue to make money from “post download opportunities such as content subscriptions and virtual item sales”.

All those extra downloads are, in theory, great new for app creators. Trouble is, the more apps there are in the marketplace, the more difficult it is for any one app to stand out from the crowd.

Juniper Research predicts that games and multimedia will continue to be the most popular consumer app category right through to 2016 and that bowser-based apps are likely to predominate in the longer term.