Mobile apps explode, but what about the little guys?

Choice is always a good thing for consumers, right? What about when you are choosing from thousands of options, as in the case with mobile application stores? Then, choice can be overwhelming. It can also mean that good things are easy to overlook. Chetan Sharma’s study, commissioned by app store GetJar and released this week, indicated that there are currently 38 app stores – a number that’s growing every day. The number of apps within them isn’t just growing, it’s exploding.

The Android Marketplace has passed the 30,000 application milestone, up from 16,000 three months ago. It’s impressive growth, but still less than Apple’s App Store, which boasts 150,000 apps and growing. Overall, Sharma found that the number of apps downloaded by consumers across the globe is set to grow from seven million last year to nearly 50 million in 2012. With hundreds of new apps being added daily, it is pretty easy to see that consumers will never hurt for a choice in mobile apps. Who might hurt, however, are the developers who get lost in this sea of choice.

At the Mobilex conference in Chicago earlier this month, I heard from developers how hard it can be to get discovered – let alone make a business – with mobile apps. Some said that the key to discoverability may come getting a media nod in a popular technology publication and letting viral marketing take over from there. There are certainly a lot of app developers whose stories make headlines that end up making millions, but that’s just not the norm. Many (most?) apps get lost in the app abyss and never make any real money. And it’s primarily the apps without a big brand name to back them up.

 Mobile analytics company Flurry’s latest report found that of the 200 best selling free and paid apps in Apple’s App Store, those apps built by developers specifically for the iPhone made up only 20% of the total. The rest were split between Web giants like Google, Facebook and eBay, adapting their content for mobile, and the more traditional gaming, retail, and media companies. Flurry said that the fact that native app developers captured 20% shows they are still relevant, but that may not be the case going forward.

“This means that the barrier to entry is still low enough for start-ups to enter and innovation to flourish,” the report said. “However, those days may be numbered as ‘discoverability’ has become a significant issue, and now ‘marketing muscle’ is starting to count more in the App Store.”

Third parties are working on fixing this problem. One, Mobango, introduced a pay-per-promoted downloads (PPD) bidding system that lets content owners bid for premium visibility on the platform, but only pay for the downloads they receive. It claims it is between five and 20 times more effective than traditional app promotion methods. But, Mobango represents yet another app store.

The app-store owner that can increase discoverability and provide an interface for easy navigation and personalization might ultimately be the most successful. Consumers need a way to find the best version of the app they want, and app-store owners need to give at least the majority of developers a paycheck to keep them coming back. Consumers will vote with their purchases what apps are the best content, but if they can’t find them or they get muscled out of the way big a big-name bully, they simply won’t be voting for it.

E-mail me at sarah.reedy@penton.com.