It's an App World, and It Could Swallow All Computing
Meet Barbara Place. She's an app-aholic. One look at her smartphone explains her condition.
She has an app to wake her, a few to provide the day's news, one to check her bank account, another to make a grocery list, two to track her diet and one to get the weather. She has an app for baseball scores and an app for movie data. One app lets her program her DVR from afar. Another helps her unwind with quizzes about famous artworks. And that's just a portion of her daily intake.
Such stories of dependency are growing as apps — shorthand for the ubiquitous software applications that live on iPhones, iPod Touches and an array of mobile devices running Google's Android operating system — continue their inexorable march from cellphone novelties to virtual personal assistants.
More than 100,000 apps now populate Apple's App Store, which opened for business two years ago. Since then, more than 2 billion apps have been downloaded at prices ranging from free to $900 (for iRa Pro, which links a phone to a surveillance camera network).
Tech specialists estimate the annual app market at $2 billion. That probably will grow once Apple's iPad, which arrives Saturday, gets going with a new breed of apps aimed at redefining the user experience.
"The sea change here is that people are gradually moving away from spending time with TV and computers to their mobile devices," says Matt Murphy, who manages the iFund — which invests in iPhone-specific app developers — for Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "And that mobile time is increasingly less about talking and all about apps."
He points to recent statistics prepared by Morgan Stanley tech analyst Mary Meeker showing that typical cellphone users now spend 30% of their 40-minutes-a-day average on data, and iPhone users spend 55% of their 60-minute average on non-talking phone activities.
"There will be no slowing this app economy," Murphy says. "Apps enrich our lives in ways specific to who we are. Look for the current app snacks we have on our iPhones to turn into a meal on the iPad as the app experiences become far more immersive."
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Source - USATODAY
