App race far from over

CNN.

Now, there's Google's Android Market, BlackBerry's App World, HP's Palm App Catalog, and Microsoft's Apps Marketplace.

But while Apple still leads the pack with an 82.7% market share, the app race is far from over.

According to a new report by Forrester Research, the app market will explode to a $38 billion industry by 2015, riding the huge growth in popularity of mobile devices from smartphones to tablets to whatever Apple dreams up next.

The New York Times notes that the report, written by John C McCarthy, an analyst at Forrester, also predicts that the enterprise business opportunities for apps will grow vastly over the next four years.

In McCarthy's view, corporations will spend up to $17 billion creating apps for their products and working with third-party services and companies that manage these apps.

Meanwhile, Information Week notes that Google last week said over the next few days, it plans to make User Managed Storage available to Google Apps customers, a benefit those using personal Google Accounts have had since late last year.