SINGAPORE: The rising use of mobile applications has been a boon for the industry.
The mobile appplication industry recorded a 68 per cent rise in global sales last year, from US$8.5 billion to US$14.3 billion.
With the growing shipment of tablets and smartphones, experts say sales growth may increase by almost four times by 2017.
Cooliris, a photo sharing and browsing application, has become the top-ranked iPad app in 75 countries.
The application has been installed two million times and there have been 300 million photo views in the past five months.
It has also distinguished itself from over 700,000 applications available in app stores across the iPhone and Android operating system.
For the company that develops Cooliris, the installations have translated to growing revenue, and it expects this growth to continue into 2013.
Meanwhile, its downloads increased by 30 times since it launched a localised version of the app in China through an integration with China's social networking platform Renren last month.
With Asia constituting 30 per cent of Cooliris' downloads, the app developer has plans to grow its presence in markets like China and Japan.
"We do see a better trend in Asia compared to Europe, in terms of engagement and consumers using the application. The affinity for consumers in Asia towards photos has always been higher and we see that translated in the engagements with the app," said Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO of Cooliris.
"The consumers are much more open when it comes to trying new things and in terms of partnership, companies understand the velocity and momentum of a Silicon Valley based startup."
Experts say Asia is fast becoming an important market for mobile application developers.
"China makes up 50 per cent of all installed base of users in Asia when we look at the smartphone market. It's really Asia where the high growth of devices and the access to app stores and apps is coming from. Also currently, Asia is where people do have money to spend," said Rachel Lashford, managing director at Canalys.
The number of smartphone users in China is growing to over 300 million.
This growth momentum has prompted more industry players to focus on Asia to expand.
Jake Saunders from ABI Research said: "We see the Asia Pacific market being the fastest growing and this is just simply due to adoption rates of people adopting and upgrading their smartphones, growth in population so for total application downloads, we're looking at from 9 billion to 70 billion downloads in 2017."
Looking ahead, experts say start-up developers will find it harder to survive in the industry.
They will have to look for more creative ways to monetise their products and beat the growing competition from free downloads.
- CNA/xq
Boom expected in mobile app industry
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