Application store market dominated by Apple's App Store, Google Play and Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace

The application store market has been forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.83% though to 2016, driven by the increasing penetration of broadband, and the increasing acceptance of mobile advertisements.

Mobile entertainment includes gaming, browsing, and watching videos on a mobile phone. Since the priorities of consumers change, their way of life also changes. Taking this into consideration, application developers have developed applications that provide entertainment.

In the present scenario, people have to travel more for business purposes, and hence the time for entertainment is limited. Therefore, the adoption of applications for entertainment is increasing.

For instance, the mobile gaming application Angry Birds is highly used by smartphone users worldwide. Additionally, mobile television is becoming popular among end-users.

Free apps accounted for 89% of total downloads in 2012. Worldwide mobile app store downloads surpassed 45.6 billion in 2012, with free downloads accounting for 40.1 billion, and paid-for downloads totalling 5 billion.

Besides a few major app stores from global OS vendors (such as Apple's App Store, Google Play and Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace), there are also stores from third parties that attract users with their brands or take advantage of the lack of dominant players in some markets.

Amazon has appealed to users with its strong brand, global presence and a good selection of high-quality content while Facebook's recently launched App Center -- supporting both mobile devices and desktops -- will become a powerful competitor due to its strong brand and leading position in social networking and gaming.

Apple's market share is the largest, considering its App Store accounts for 25% of available apps in all stores. The number of apps available is driven by an increasing number of stores in the market today that include platform owners, device vendors, communication service providers (CSPs) and others who want to offer core mobile app services.

While iOS revenues still hold a lead over its rival, Google Play revenues were up 311% overall from January 2012 and downloads were up 48%. The iOS App Store is expected to add over 435,000 new apps to its roster in 2013, up from around 380K in 2012.

For more information on the application store market, see the latest research: Application Store Market

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