In-Stat Puts Tablet Apps Market at $15 Billion in 2015
In the Wild West days when a technology market is emerging and expanding, everyone wants a guess at how big the market could be before getting involved.
That's the case now with the opportunity for tablet apps. More than a year ago, around the time of the first Apple iPad launch, researcher Michael Wolf at GigaOm Pro estimated that tablet apps would be an $8 billion market by 2015.
A year later, following the highly successful launch of the iPad 2 as well as the introduction of a number of competitive tablets, the back-of-the-envelope calculations are going up.
In-Stat this week forecast that tablet application revenues will top $15 billion by 2015. Researcher Amy Cravens based the new forecast partly on user surveys, which also found that 80 percent of tablet applications downloads came through an OS provider store. (Given that the Apple iPad owns 95 percent of the market by In-Stat's figures, read that as the Apple App Store.)
"The majority of respondents prefer using the application store as the preferred method of payment for both the applications and in-application purchases," according to In-Stat's research release.
Based on a year of data and usage patterns in the smartphone market, the tablet apps market is shaping up to be bigger than first expected and should be a place where a few fortunes will be made.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 26, 2011