As the Remote Workforce now takes a permanent foothold here in the United States, there is going to be one common denominator: People will use their smartphones more than ever before, to conduct both personal and work-related matters. Notably, there will even be more reliance on mobile apps. Consider these statistics:
- At the present time, there are well over 3.2 billion smartphone users on a global basis. This number is only expected to increase in the future, as more companies adopt a Cloud-based infrastructure. In fact, technology gurus estimate that the total number of smartphone users will surpass 7 billion by 2025.
- The mobile app market is expected to reach a whopping $100 billion by the year 2024.
Mobile App Usage By Market Sector
Here are some statistics on mobile app usage by industry:
At the present time, the two dominate mobile app players are:
- The App Store: More than 2 million mobile apps;
- The Google Play: 3.4 million mobile apps.
Here is how the mobile app market breaks out by market sector:
- The Financial Industry: Mobile apps in this sector have been downloaded 4.6 billion times on a global basis, with an annual growth rate of 15%.
- The Hospitality Industry: Mobile apps have been downloaded 400 million times, and this represents a growth rate of 20% year over year.
- The Travel Industry: Almost 11 million apps have been recently downloaded, which represents an astonishing growth rate of 81%. This number is only expected to grow as the COVID-19 restrictions start to ease up worldwide.
But it’s not just the mobile apps themselves that are gaining in popularity; the advertising revenue that is generated from mobile apps is tremendous. Consider these statistics:
- On a global basis, mobile advertising revenue reached $276 billion.
- In the US, ad revenue has reached $113 billion.
- The ad revenue for Facebook was around $84 billion.
- The ad revenue for Google was at $147 billion.
(Sources 1, 2)
What might stop the growth rate for mobile apps?
There is one thing that might stop these numbers from growing exponentially: the Cyber Threat Landscape. The Cyber Threat Landscape is becoming more complex and stealthier every day, and the mobile app is a favorite target of today’s Cyberattacker.
There are many ways for a hacker to penetrate into a mobile app and deliver a malicious payload. But one of the more pronounced avenues in which they can find their way in are the mistakes that mobile app developers make during the development process.
While insecure source code design can be a common culprit, other factors in the app development process also come into play. This will be examined in the next article in this series, as we take a closer look at what can be done to correct these weaknesses, so that the mobile app industry can continue to grow.
Source:
- https://intersog.com/blog/mobile-app-development-statistics/
- https://clearbridgemobile.com/stats-for-mobile-app-growth-and-success/
Ravi Das is an Intermediate Technical Writer for a large IT Services Provider based in South Dakota. He also has his own freelance business through Technical Writing Consulting, Inc.
He holds the Certified In Cybersecurity certificate from the ISC(2).
