According to a study by MyVoucherCodes, of 1,476 British mobile phone owners, four fifths, 79% say they are ‘highly unlikely’ to use applications they have paid to download more than once.
The survey, commissioned by the UK’s leading discount voucher code website, http://www.MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, has found that just 9% of smartphone users haven’t paid to download an app or game.
The application industry, set to be worth £4.3bn throughout 2010 if market research firm Gartner’s figures are correct[1], is dominated by Apple, a company that enjoys more than 90% of the market share. More than 3bn applications were downloaded in 2009, and an estimated 4.5bn will be downloaded throughout 2010.
There are approximately 50m smartphone users globally, 11m of which are in the UK. Given that four fifths of smartphone owners say that they are highly unlikely to use applications or games they download, the research therefore indicates that £747.3m will be spent on applications that are not used beyond first download in 2010*.
The study found that 27% of people said they had chosen their particular smartphone for the range of mobile applications they knew was available on that handset.
According to the results found, a fifth, 19%, of respondents said they downloaded at least one application every week.
The average cost of an application through Apple’s Appstore is £1.85, according to aggregated figures[2].
Games also proved to be a novelty for smartphone users, with 62% admitting that they had games on their mobile phone that they had not played since downloading. The average game via Apple’s Appstore costs £0.81
