New market projections from Juniper Research are said to have shown that the number of mobile application downloads will approach almost 20 billion per annum by 2014. The increasing deployment of app stores targeted at mass market handsets, allied to enhancements in storefront interfaces and an ever increasing array of titles appealing to wider demographics have been the main factors driving this market, says Juniper.
The Mobile Applications research found that the remarkable success of the App Store – which passed 1 billion downloads in April – has led a raft of vendors, OS providers and operators to launch their own storefronts, with more poised to launch over the coming months.
At the same time, Juniper has announced its first Future Mobile Awards for Mobile Applications. The Future Mobile Awards are given to companies that Juniper believes have made significant progress within their sector during the previous year, and are poised to make considerable market impact in the future.
Juniper's first Gold Award for Mobile Apps goes to acrossair for their ingenious augmented reality app, "Nearest Tube", developed for the iPhone 3GS. Co-Founder of acrossair, Chetan Damani says; "We are extremely pleased to have been awarded the Gold award for Mobile Apps by Juniper Research, a number of late nights went in to creating this application and it's rewarding for the whole team to be recognised for the work they put in by an organisation such as Juniper. Everyone in the technology landscape has heard of Juniper Research and it's a great accolade for all our techies and designers in the team to receive a Gold award for our nearest tube app."
Meanwhile, the Silver Award was given to Tapulous, the developer behind the highly successful ‘Tap Tap Revenge' and its recently published sequel, ‘Tap Tap Revenge 2'.