Just how big is the present day mobile app market?

If like us, your smartphone never leaves your side, it will probably come as no surprise to hear that there are 6.5 million apps currently available to mobile users on the world’s top app stores. What’s more – there is a huge consumer demand for those apps, with research from Yahoo showing that 90% of time spent on mobile is actually spent with apps rather than mobile internet browsing.

The majority of the world’s 6.5 million apps are available from the two biggest players in the industry, Apple and Google. The Apple Store lists 2.2 million (a figure that’s growing each day), while the Google Play Store offers upwards of 2.8 million mobile apps. This figure has consistently increased over recent years and is expected to rise even further in the future.

It’s not just the number of available apps on the market that has increased. Statistics show that the number of app users and the average amount of time they spend using apps has also risen concurrently. The average mobile app user will download as many as 8.8 apps every month on average and will spend 90% of their time accessing information using app-based content. That’s just 10% of all mobile screen time allocated to mobile web browsers.

With such a rapidly increasing customer base, the app industry has become one of the most profitable markets in the world. In 2016 global app revenues were at 88.3 billion U.S. dollars, which was an 18.6 billion dollar increase on the previous year. These figures take into account both app store purchases and in-app advertising revenue. Projections suggest that if the industry continues to grow as it has been doing, market revenue will be at 188.9 billion dollars by 2020.

Such rapid growth offers many opportunities to developers and potential business ventures. App development is becoming an increasingly popular field of work, with an estimated 12 million developers currently working around the world. Increased integration of mobile apps into industries such as banking and travel, along with an increasing number of smartphone users in emerging economies , is also helping the global app market to grow even further.

Thanks to improvements in software technology and an increase in market accessibility it’s now easier than ever for new companies to penetrate the app market. The number of smartphone users around the world is expected to hit 6.1 billion by the year 2020 , which offers a lot of opportunity for new ventures to flourish and for existing companies to utilise the opportunities offered by mobile apps.