When mobile handheld devices first came into being, they were considered just as a matter of communication. Since that a lot of things in the market had changed in a qualitative way.
At the present moment, mobile phones serve not only the purpose of communication – they adopted functional features from cameras, game consoles, web browsers, organizers, and many others. As a matter of fact, the concept of a mobile phone itself is so different now that it looks more like the concept of a laptop.
The situation leads to emergence of new markets as well as to the boost of markets that were in embryo before. Mobile application development is one of these embryo markets: from a comparatively sluggish direction of software engineering, it turned to the most rapidly growing sphere of applications development that evolves and changes daily.
The variety of mobile applications’ types couldn’t be even counted, and the industry scale seems to be doubled by the end of 2010. Mobile web browsing can be considered as one of the major reasons of such an impressing market growth. There were 254 million US mobile subscribers in Q1 2008, according to CTIA, the wireless industry trade group.
According to ABI Research, despite of the World Economic Crisis, the industry remains to leverage its growing tempo: even under the worst recovery scenarios, mobile services revenues will continue to grow at nearly 1.2% through 2014, a 0.5% loss over pre-crisis conditions.
Major corporations like Apple or Google release their own platforms, development tools (do you remember Apple iPhone Touch SDK that Apple came up with in a recent time?) for gadgets that really can be named as “revolutionary cultural concepts”. Those “revolutions” happen so fast that one can easily get lost in the forest of new iPhones, G1s, HTCs, and stuff.
What has been written above will definitely result in a Mobile IT boom when mobile application development services will be of extremely high demand, bringing unparalleled revenue to mobile development companies. In their turn, those companies will constantly extend their expertise by adapting to the newest technologies & platforms and bring more and more innovative solutions to the market.