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ABI Research: iPhone’s App Market Share to Shrink, Android to Benefit

ABI Research, a marketing research firm based in New York, released a study about the future of the mobile app market in the next five years. The firm expects application downloads to reach five billion by 2014, up from an estimated 2.3 billion in 2009.

The remarkable part of the study is their prediction of Android as a heavyweight challenger of Apple's reign. Their dominance will peak next year, but only to start its decline into the following years ceding ground to Android's aggressive offer.

Here's an excerpt of the press release:

“The iPhone’s share of the app market will contract from its 2010 level during the latter part of the forecast period, but it will remain the leading platform for applications...The big beneficiary will be Android, which will see its market share of total application downloads increase from 11% of the market in 2009 to 23% in 2014. This rapid growth is driven by the mass adoption of the Android OS by both vendors and consumers from 2009 onwards. There are now more than 14 phones that run the Android OS, and many more will launch in 2010. This, coupled with the rollout of application stores from both smartphone vendors and network operators, will see the iPhone’s share of the total market shrink between 2010 and 2014.”

You can read the entire press release here

I'm a Software Engineer and extremely passionate Smartphone enthusiast; I've been working with mobile devices for a long time and contributing to the mobile community for about as long. Currently I'm a contributor for AndroidGuys.com and move on the Android space in general, before that I was a contributor to the Windows Mobile community as part of the "Board of Experts" at the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine Best Software Awards; and I also served as Technical Reviewer for a Microsoft Learning official course on Windows Mobile 6 Development (Course 6066A). You can follow me on Twitter -> http://twitter.com/jdgx

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  • Steven

    I would take this with a grain of salt. The iPhone OS saw 2,000,000,000 nearly downloads in 2010 and it is only accelerating. To think the ENTIRE market (as the Android market place, MS's market, BB, Symbian are just starting) will represent a paltry 5,000,000,000 in 4 more years??? I would think the iPhone's alone will be near 10,000,000,000 to 15,000,000,000 downloads by themselves by 2014. Add in Android and the other platforms and numbers in the 20,000,000,000 to 30,000,000,000 seem much more realistic.

  • lamont adair

    well its good to see such an ambitious outlook towards google platform for mobile devices.However, I think that your research lacks some definitive facts regarding Apple. Mainly people enjoy the Apple experience. Amongst other things the quality of there retail outlets, there customer service, there genius bar and above all there macs. People keep saying how Apple share will decline, but the fact remains Apple had thought out the basis of everything including the ecosystem of the App store and how it interacts with there retail services, down to the genius bar. So before your quick to say Apple going to lose market share realize Apple system is working for a reason and it's not easy for anyone including the likes of google to come and assault the prize possession of Apple.

  • James

    Is this prediction based on the idea that Apple is only going to release one update at a time to the current iPhone 3G model?

    I suspect that Apple is getting ready to release a lower-end iPhone to take some of the nearly free phone market. If the current carrier subsidy is about $400 and Apple can produce an iPhone that retails at say $449, then the market share numbers above are completely wrong. How many $49 CDMA/EVDO iPhones on Verizon do you think they would sell in the first year?

    These predictions seem to be based on the idea that Apple is going to keep doing the same thing for the next 4 years. If you look at how Apple approached the iPod market and assume they are going to follow that same business model, then they are about due to release a low-end entry to the smart phone market.

  • ari-free

    It's not possible for Apple to think of everything. That's why so many people are jailbreaking their iPhone so that they can get apps from cydia, etc.

  • http://www.lfn.ch Anonymous

    Do you think I should buy apple shares now, or is it too late?

  • https://mutiarar06.student.ipb.ac.id Mutia

    wow big battle between apple and google..