A Look at App Trends

The opportunities to offer services and products tailored to mobile users are endless. According to eMarketer, there will be 30.9 million smartphone users in the UK this year which represents 48.4% of the UK population and 60.4% of the UK mobile phone users. Moreover, tablets are increasingly used – this past July in the UK, 12.8 million people connected to the Internet via tablets.

What is more, according to Gatner, an expert in app trends, 102,062 million mobile apps will be downloaded worldwide in 2013, among which 91% will be free apps. Nevertheless, the paid app market continues to grow – by the end of 2013, 9,186 million paid mobile apps should be downloaded.

Since the mobile app market has become a very attractive sector, many companies and expert websites have been carrying out studies in order to predict the future app trends.

One of the app trends that draw the most interest is that of the operating systems, because it indicates whether an app should be designed for one single operating system or for various ones. For instance, in the UK, iPhone now accounts for 47.15% of the mobile phone market, followed by Android which represents 30.97% of the market and Blackberry with 16.73%. Other operating systems are also used, such as Windows Phone (3.2%), Series 40 (0.64%), Symbian (0.46%) and Samsung OS (0.2%).

At Nimble Mobile, we study the habits of mobile users, and we care about app trends because they will help us guaranty the best user experience. Nowadays, native apps are increasingly used because the companies care about how their customers will see their websites. In fact, half of the UK mobile web users are not satisfied with usability as 52% of them claim that more than half of the websites they visited via their mobile devices were not optimized.

Share: