iPhone Application Market Background
The past 3 years have seen significant growth in mobile internet usage. This aggressive growth in mobile data network revenues is projected to continue well into 2012 by IDC.
Figure1: IDCs mobile-operator analysis reveals the disproportionate increase in wireless data usage and revenues compared with traditional voice services
The advent of user friendly location aware smart-phones combined with faster mobile internet speeds is changing the way that people use the internet. This presents a whole host of new opportunities for travel businesses from mobile booking applications to travel itinerary / ancillary sales applications.
Gartner projects that 1.82 billion smart-phones will be in use by 2013. (Outstripping the expected 1.78 billion PCs). This indicates that more consumers will be using the internet on mobile devices than on conventional PC's by 2013.
When deciding on a mobile platform strategy it's important to assess which mobile platform to target. Especially if budget for the project is constrained.
In this section
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The following table illustrates global handset sales data, year on year, 3rd quarter 2008 vs 3rd quarter 2009
| Q3 2009 | Q3 2008 | |||
| Company | Sales (1000s) | Share (%) | Sales (1000s) | Share (%) |
| Nokia | 16,156.4 | 39.3 | 15,472.3 | 42.3 |
| Research in Motion | 8,522.7 | 20.8 | 5,800.4 | 15.9 |
| Apple | 7,040.4 | 17.1 | 4720.3 | 12.9 |
| HTC | 2,659.5 | 6.5 | 1,656.3 | 4.5 |
| Samsung | 1,320.6 | 3.2 | 1,114.8 | 3.0 |
| Others | 5,368 | 13.1 | 7,793.3 | 21.3 |
| Total | 41,067.6 | 100 | 35,557.4 | 100 |
We can see from this data that, although they concede some market share to rivals, Nokia are still by far the most popular handset sales wise with a total of 39.3% market share in the 3rd quarter of 2009.
Looking at this data in isolation leads you to believe that symbian should be the platform of choice for developing mobile applications. This proves not to be the case when data from Admob is taken into account.
Admob is a mobile pay per click advertising platform following the same business model as Google Adwords. The following data illustrates data network usage on mobile browsers and mobile applications.
Despite the iphone being only the 3rd most popular handset sales wise with 17.1% market share they dominate the mobile data usage market with 50% share.
Inventive IT have extensive experience of developing applications for the iphone platform. We launched irooms, one of the most downloaded hotel booking applications on the appstore, in Oct 2009. Irooms is currently downloaded 300 per day and has an average active user to sales conversion rate of > 2%.
