Mobile applications are on the increase, says international analyst house Gartner.
The company has identified the top 10 consumer mobile applications for 2012, with mobile money transfer taking the lead.
“We predict that most users will use no more than five mobile applications at a time and most future opportunities will come from niche market 'killer applications',” says Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner.
Money transfer allows people to message each other cash, and applications in this space are popular because it costs less, and is faster and convenient. However, Gartner warns there are regulatory and operational challenges that come along with this type of application.
“Because of the fast growth of mobile money transfer, regulators in many markets are piling in to investigate the impact on consumer costs, security, fraud and money laundering,” says Shen.
Mobile search is in third place, because of its high impact on technology innovation and industry revenue. However, Shen says developers need to work on making a friendlier user experience before it will really take off.
With the larger number of smartphones flooding the market, mobile browsing has come in at number four. “Mobile Web systems have the potential to offer a good return on investment. They involve much lower development costs than native code, reuse many existing skills and tools, and can be agile - both delivered and updated quickly,” says the company.
Mobile health monitoring and mobile payments took fifth and sixth place. Mobile advertising only managed to crack eighth on the list. According to Gartner, total spending on mobile advertising in 2008 was $530.2 million, which Gartner expects to grow to $7.5 billion in 2012.
Instant messaging (IM) and mobile music snuck onto the bottom of the list, both with commercial challenges. For IM, many mobile carriers are reluctant to lose their voice markets, and have made it difficult for the technology to flourish. Music has only really seen good growth in the ringtones arena.
“Consumer mobile applications and services are no longer the prerogative of mobile carriers. The increasing consumer interest in smartphones, the participation of Internet players in the mobile space, and the emergence of application stores are reducing the dominance of mobile carriers. Each player will influence how the application is delivered and experienced by consumers, who ultimately vote with their attention and spending power,” concludes Shen.
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