Telecoms.com

The raft of mobile app stores opening their doors at present will pave the way for direct and indirect revenues from mobile applications to exceed $25bn by 2014.

Figures released by industry analyst Juniper Research this week found that while the overwhelming majority of app revenues are currently accrued from one off downloads, the increasing use of in app billing will enable incremental revenues from additional content and value added services (VAS) providing the dominant revenue stream by 2011.

Juniper also believes that many Tier 1 operators would seek to deploy their own app stores in a bid to maintain content revenue share, however, the researcher believes that in the longer term, the greatest benefits to operators would be derived from data revenues associated with app usage rather than from the retail price of apps and content – as long as operators rejected the walled garden approach.

Juniper analyst Windsor Holden, said, “Data revenue growth is dependent upon operators embracing policies which enable open access – a policy which also involves facilitating app stores which compete with their on-portal offerings.”

Last week, telecoms.com spoke to Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at mobile messaging firm Airwide Solutions, which recently commissioned its own research carried out by analyst mobileSquared, revealing that almost all operators expect to keep some degree of control over app store environments.

While around 45 per cent of mobile operators expect to directly control less than 10 per cent of the apps and services made available via the app store model, those who plan to control 20-30 per cent amount to around 36 per cent of global carriers.

But the research predicts that efforts to control this content risks significantly increasing the amount of fragmentation that application developers and publishers will need to address if they want to deploy services across multiple operators and on multiple handsets.