The proliferation of mobile content has caught Taptu (and a lot of other people) by surprise. Perhaps unsurprisingly the number of mobile applications has also increased rather dramatically. There’s an interesting balance to be struck for content producers between device-specific applications and app stores, and the general availability, but reduced functionality, of a mobile web site. Taptu’s latest report explores these details.
From their report:
Indeed, the rapid pace of growth of the Mobile Touch Web has taken us by surprise. In January, when we released our first report on the Mobile Touch Web, one of the forecasts we made was that the number of sites would grow to more than 500,000 at the end of 2010, and to one million by the end of 2011.
But we’ve now had to amend this prediction. If the Mobile Touch Web continues to grow at the swift rate we’re currently seeing, then by the end of 2010, we believe the touch-friendly Web will have an estimated 1.1 million sites, almost twice our original forecast, and nearly a full year ahead of our January forecast.
Not only are the number of Mobile Touch Web sites increasing, but so too are the number of mobile applications in the various app stores.
Application stores, too, continue to see strong growth. As of April 2010, Apple’s App Store counted 185,000 available apps, for an annual growth rate of 144 percent. The biggest leap in progress has been at the Android Store, which as of April has a total of 35,947 apps, giving
it an annual growth rate of 403 percent.
Taptu has some interesting data about government and non-profit adoption of mobile web, which is worth a read.