Asia Pacific Smartphone Users Seen to Download 5 Billion Apps in 2011

If you are still having doubts about the popularity of smartphone apps, then consider the results of the latest Ovum study.

Ovum found that smartphone users in the Asia Pacific would be downloading five billion in 2011. That represents a whooping 189% increase in mobile apps download year on year. This will also increase in the next five years with app downloads totaling 14 billion by 2016.

Not only that, Ovum also projects that the Asia Pacific market would give mobile apps around $871 million in revenues. Within the next five years, total mobile app revenues would be around $2.2 billion.

The figures for the year 2010 shows that there were 1.6 billion apps downloaded that year, earning paid apps a total of $302 million.

The Ovum study also shows that Android apps are more popular in the Asia Pacific with 1.8 billion downloads, compared to Apple’s 1.5 billion app installations.

This trend will continue and in 5 years, Android apps will be downloaded 6.07 billion times, almost doubling the projected Apple downloads of 3.4 billion.

This study shows that even now, mobile apps are being used by more and more people, and that trend will continue even into the future. Mobile apps are a great way to get your marketing up to speed, and to put your company, brand, products and services in front of your target customers.

Ovum also puts out some guidance for those companies that are looking into creating their own mobile apps. Ovum principal analyst Eden Zoller as people become more aware of these apps, there will be “less tolerance” for second rate apps. Zoller also says that people are only willing to download and pay for “must-have” apps, and it is your challenge to come up with a useful app that would help people increase productivity or offer more convenience. Other apps that would be popular are those that are fun, fashionable and cool.