There’s no doubt that there’s been both an explosion of growth in mobile app downloads and app stores. While Apple’s App Store has dominated in terms of number of apps and downloads, Distimo just released a study that projects the Android Market will become the largest store in terms of number of applications in about five months from now, passing the App Store.
Today, ABI research is reporting that the app industry is on its way to achieving 44 billion cumulative downloads by 2016. Similar to Distimo’s findings, ABI reports that Android and Windows Phone 7 are steadily catching up with Apple in terms of downloads.
So far, over 3 billion apps have been downloaded from the Android Market and Apple passed 10 billion app downloads in January. Last year alone, ABI estimated that total app downloads approached 8 billion.
And we see more and more App Stores popping up (i.e. Appia and Amazon’s Android App Store) and increased smartphone usage, downloads should increase significantly over the next few years.