Analytics firm App Annie has published its latest set of predictions for the smartphone apps market in 2017.
Obligatory big numbers: it anticipates 195bn global downloads across Android and iOS this year, with smartphone owners spending $81bn on those apps.
App Annie also breaks down the latter number by store, predicting $40bn of spending within Apple’s App Store, $21bn from Android’s official Google Play store, and a further $20bn from third-party Android app stores.
If true, that would be the first year when combined Android apps generate more spending than iOS apps thanks to those third-party stores, even though Apple’s app store would be doing nearly twice the revenues of Google’s.
Also useful: App Annie’s claim that the top five countries by apps revenue – China, the US, Japan, South Korea and the UK – accounted for 75% of global app store revenues in 2016.
And if you want some even bigger numbers, App Annie reckons that global downloads will rise to 352bn by 2012, while revenues will reach $139bn.
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