Archive for January 2017
An ITU research report Connecting the Unconnected released at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) says that 3.9 billion people, more than half the World’s population have still never been online. This despite the vast increases in relatively cheap particularly wireless based connectivity and devices.
The ITU predicts that one billion of the currently unconnected will come online by 2020 but that they will be dominantly urban based and already within reach of existing wireless and wireline infrastructure.
58% of the unconnected are women and 60% live in rural areas. The ITU is calling for concerted action to address the shortfall and to lift access to the online world and the skills and opportunities it would bring to the rural poor of the World.
According to recently released analysis from IHS Markit global smartphone numbers in use will grow from four billion in 2016 to more than six billion by 2020. They also say that the four billion smartphones (of a total of 7 billion mobile devices today) represent over 60% of all smart connected consumer devices.
IHS Director Ian Fogg says “Mobile devices and services are now the hub for people’s entertainment and business lives, as well as for communication. The smartphone has replaced the PC as the most important smart connected device.”
With the likely Tsunami of smart connected devices as part of the IoT and supported in the mobile space by 4G Advanced and 5G it is predicted by Machina Research that there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2020. If this comes to pass then the current smartphone dominance will be no more.
The often quoted industry source App Annie has reported mobile app download revenue continuing to increase by 40% in 2016 to $35Bn USD. The estimate of total content revenue which adds in app purchasing and advertising and 3rd party Android app store revenue is $89Bn.
Games dominates the category with 75% of app download revenue in iOS and 90% of Android revenue coming from games.
Statistica reported that in June 2016 Google Play Store had 2.2M apps, Apple App Store 2.0M, Windows Store 0.7M, Amazon Appstore 0.6M and Blackberry World 0.23M.