Mobile Applications – A growing business trend

“Mobile apps are gaining the momentum as more people are shifting towards smart phones.”

The mobile application marketplace will reach $25 billion by 2015, according to a report from World Mobile Applications Market, a U.S.-based market research firm.

Companies are heading more towards the mobile app development or getting their website converted in to mobile applications in order to keep their customers in reach even if they are away from computer and internet.

Despite the fact that it is difficult to make the user download the particular app, than getting him connected through the brand’s corporate website, there is quite significant growth seen in the app market. But, it is extremely important that the design and the usability should be mainly, according to the user’s requirement. Although mobile applications have several added benefits over mobile web pages in terms of user experience. There are few reasons why companies don’t go for apps and rely on mobile websites. Even though, a mobile website is nothing but a distilled version of the company’s corporate website, but it can be accessed through any browser enabled handset. On the contrary building mobile application is relatively costly and there are different platform for mobiles which include iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian etc. Each requires specific set of skills to develop a particular app and make it run on various smart phones.

According to a survey, it has been observed that growth of the mobile application is also dependent upon the use of mobile data plans. Currently in US, about 25% of wireless subscribers have  data plans. But by 2012, around 60% of mobile users in the US will subscribe to a data plan. Data plans are crucial to mobile app growth, because they provide consumers an incentive to download applications.

As a Smartphone user, what features do you require particularly in a company’s app, which makes you download it?