Subscribe to AfterDawn's weekly newsletter.
Free Applications Driving Mobile Content use and Product Development, as GetJar Passes 200 Million Downloads
LONDON, April 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Sophisticated free mobile applications including social networking, video and messaging products have firmly established themselves as mass market leaders, according to data from GetJar (http://www.getjar.com/wap.getjar.com), the world's leading mobile applications portal. With over 200 million applications downloaded from GetJar in the last two years alone, trends show that free application content is driving both product development and user activity across the mobile landscape. "As the quality, variety and relevance of free mobile applications has grown, so specialist, niche products have become mass market brands," explained Ilja Laurs, Founder and CEO of GetJar. "The hottest free applications including mig33, eBuddy and cellity are seeing massive growth in user numbers, and will continue to do so as major industry forces such as carriers expand their offering of free applications." GetJar is also seeing significant developer and user interest in personal productivity applications, such as calendars, reminders and synchronisation tools, especially for the Windows Mobile and BlackBerry platforms. Video applications too are growing in popularity, with current offerings overcoming some of the problems associated with mobile video in the past, such as their ability to deal with multiple video formats, and the amount of quality video content available to users. GetJar predicts that GPS technology is likely to provide further impetus to the mobile application market. As phones are increasingly manufactured with powerful in-built GPS capabilities, the variety of applications is likely to grow dramatically. "This will include both functional applications of the type we all know already, such as navigation, to much more elaborate GPS-based games, where the user location is central to game play," predicted Laurs. While mobile games remain very popular, the extent to which they are being downloaded now makes up no more than 20% of all mobile applications, according to GetJar. "The popularity of all the other types of mobile applications demonstrate the sheer diversity of use to which mobiles are now put," said Laurs.
