• by Aaron Baar , April 8, 2010

Consumers' love affair with mobile Apps isn't waning. But that doesn't mean marketers have plenty of time to figure out their mobile App strategies.

According to ABI Research, people will download around 6 billion mobile apps in 2010, up from an estimated 2.4 billion downloaded in 2009. The main drivers for the increase: the rise to the rapid adoption of smartphones (which had a 20% sales growth in 2009) and the proliferation of App stores for those platforms. And with two new platforms set to debut later this year (Samsung's Bada OS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7), the growth will only continue.

In the near term, anyway. According to ABI, App downloads will peak around 2013 and then begin to decline, along with any revenues developers might be seeing from App sales. By then, Mark Beccue, a senior analyst at ABI Research, tells Marketing Daily, most users planning to adopt a smartphone will have one, and they will have weeded out which Apps they really use or need.

"You'll [also] have several Apps pre-loaded on phones, which will bring us back to where we were before," says Beccue. In order to stand out and maintain popularity on the best-selling or most-downloaded lists, App developers will have to move to a free or advertiser-supported model, he says. "What I project is that free apps are going to dominate over time because of their potential use as a marketing application," he says.

A grocery store chain, for instance, could brand one of the many free grocery list creation Apps already available to consumers, he says.

But the key moving forward for development and download will be utility. "Over time, app developers are going to have to get smarter because if [the apps] don't have a use, we're not going to want them," he says.