Top Ten Mobile Apps for 2012
Smartphones will soon be a major payment method via SMS, if predictions made today by Gartner come true. The market research company has bypassed end of the world doomsters and come up with a list of the top 10 consumer mobile applications of 2012, and money transfer tops the list.
Applications were ranked for their impact on consumers and industry, taking into account revenues, loyalty, business model, consumer value and estimated market penetration. The list pretty much makes sense when you consider that Gartner expects that smartphones will make up 45.5 percent of all mobile phone sales in 2013, compared to about 9 percent in 2008.
“Consumer mobile applications and services are no longer the prerogative of mobile carriers,” said Gartner’s Sandy Shen. “The increasing consumer interest in smartphones, the participation of Internet players in the mobile space, and the emergence of application stores and cross-industry services are reducing the dominance of mobile carriers. Each player will influence how the application is delivered and experienced by consumers, who ultimately vote with their attention and spending power.”
“The ultimate competition between industry players is for control of the ‘ecosystem’ and user experience, and the owner of the ecosystem will benefit the most in terms of revenue and user loyalty,” Ms. Shen said. “We predict that most users will use no more than five mobile applications at a time and most future opportunities will come from niche market ‘killer applications’”
Predicted Top 10 consumer mobile applications in 2012:
- No. 1: Money Transfer: Sending money to others using Short Message Service (SMS) has lower costs, faster speed and convenience compared with traditional transfer services, especially in developing markets. and most services signed up several million users within their first year.
No. 2: Location-Based Services.
No. 3: Mobile Search
No. 4: Mobile Browsing
No. 5: Mobile Health Monitoring
No. 6: Mobile Payment
No. 7: Near Field Communication Services (NFC allows contactless data transfer between compatible devices by placing them close to each other, within ten centimeters.)
No. 8: Mobile Advertising Gartner expects will grow to $7.5 billion in 2012.
No. 9: Mobile Instant Messaging
No. 10: Mobile Music
The full report “Dataquest Insight: The Top Ten Consumer Mobile Applications for 2012" is available on Gartner’s website
