Apple announced that more than 100 million applications have been downloaded from the company’s App Store in less than one year. Featuring thousands of free and paid applications-the store now has more than 500,000 applications total-customers have downloaded more than 18 billion applications and continue to download more than 1 billion applications per month.
Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of platform solutions and emerging business at Autodesk said with Autodesk products in both the App Store and Mac App Store, they can reach hundreds of millions of Apple users around the world. “With our free AutoCAD WS and the more powerful professional drafting tools of AutoCAD LT, we’re using the Mac App Store to deliver new products and reach a growing base of new Mac customers,” he said.
The Mac App Store offers thousands of applications in education, games, graphics and design, lifestyle, productivity, utilities and other categories. Users can browse new applications, look up top charts for paid and free applications, as well as user ratings and reviews. The store is included with Mac OS X Lion and is available as a software update for any Mac running Snow Leopard. Mac developers set the prices for their applications, keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, are not charged for free applications and do not have to pay hosting, marketing or credit card fees.
“The Mac App Store has unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and development cycle,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Offering Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image-editing software and stay ahead of the competition.”
Small businesses rely increasingly on mobile applications for their companies, according to an AT&T Small Business Technology Poll released earlier this year. The national survey of small businesses (with two to 50 employees) revealed that 72 percent indicate they use mobile applications in their business, with roughly 38 percent reporting they could not survive-or it would be a major challenge to survive-without mobile applications.
The driving force behind the widespread adoption of mobile applications for business is time savings, increased productivity and reduction of costs. Moreover, GPS/navigation and mapping mobile applications are by far the most popular, with 49 percent of the respondents reporting they use them for their small business.
Overall, smartphones and tablets represent more than 90 percent of the new net growth in device adoption for the next four years. Additionally, increasing application platform capability across all classes of mobile phones is spurring a new frontier of innovation, particularly where mobile capabilities can be integrated with location, presence and social information to enhance the usefulness.
Innovation is moving to the edge for mobile devices, according to a December report by IT research firm Gartner, whereas, in 2011, the firm estimated application-development projects targeting PCs to be on par with mobile development. Future adoption will triple from 2010 to 2014, and will result in the vast majority of client-side applications being mobile only or mobile-first for these devices.