What will Top Applications do in 2012?

Soumis par eve.renard le mer, 12/09/2009 - 19:51

Once again I would like to tell you about a press release of the IT research and advisory company Gartner. And it deals directly with what we are doing, here in Latin3G: they identified what will be the Top 10 Consumer Mobile Applications for 2012.

They first underline the reduction of “the dominance of mobile carriers”. They are not the only industry players any more, more and more applications are offered by developers who are not linked with these carriers. Well, no breaking news here… That is exactly what we exist for!

Then the analysis comes to the actual list… Here are, according to Gartner, the 10 features which will make the difference in 2012 (if we do not all die before it has time to come true):

  • Money transfer, to send money from a user to another via SMS… The main question not being the way this application could work, but of course how it would be regulated,
  • Location-Based Services, because it meets various consumer’s “real-life needs”, in a lot of different sectors, both professional an personal (a good example of Location Based application by Latin3G… ),
  • Mobile search,
  • Mobile browsing,
  • Mobile health monitoring, a market which is still at an early stage but with huge potential give that health is of course a “business” where mobility is a great advantage to offer an real improvement of the quality of life,
  • Mobile payment,
  • Near Field Communication Services, consisting in data transfer between devices within a radius of 10 centimeters, obviously without any contact,
  • Mobile advertising, pulling more and more millions of dollars into the market, and chosen by all the modern advertisers as part of their marketing strategy,
  • Mobile Instant Messaging
  • Mobile music

Maybe what I’m most surprised about is that mobile games are not in this list, whereas they are clearly an integral part, for example, of iTunes best-sellers. Does this mean it is the right moment to focus on these ten features and to leave out the many other kinds of applications being developed every day?

Time will tell… 2012 is not so far!