Starting with CES in early January and through the Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, the mobile industry has been in a feeding frenzy of announcement activity. At CES, it was centered on Android-powered tablets. During the Mobile World Congress, it was about the big Microsoft/Nokia deal and vendors scrambling to differentiate their Android handsets.

But behind all these announcements, there is a broader shift going on to what Forrester calls the mobile app Internet and the accompanying broader wave of app development and management. We have just published a report that explores the different vectors of innovation and sizes the mobile app Internet from an app sales and services opportunity.

The report looks at the three factors beyond hardware that will drive the market:

  1. Even at $2.43/app, the app market will emerge as a $38B market by 2015 as more tablets and smart phones are sold and the number of paid for apps per device increases due to improvements in the app store experience.
  2. A perfect storm of innovation is unleashed by the merger of mobile, cloud, and smart computing. I see innovation coming from the combination of apps and smart devices like appliances and cars, improved user experience around the apps by better leveraging the context from the sensors in the devices, and enabling the apps to take advantage of new capabilities like near field communications (NFC) for things such as mobile payments.
  3. Helping enterprises ride out the perfect storm of innovation is a $17B services opportunity. Firms will need help building mobile apps for employees and customers. Corporations will also need third-party services firms to manage the devices and apps as well as to set up and to administer their own private label enterprise app stores. And finally, the CIO and business executives will hire consultants to help their reengineer their business processes to take full advantage of the mobile and tablet apps and innovation.

The combined spend on apps and services will be $US54.6B a year by 2015. The shift to the mobile App Internet disrupts basically everything you thought you knew about building, delivering, and managing applications. It will also dramatically impact how traditional software is sold and delivered. Every part of the IT delivery system will be affected by these tiny tools we call apps. What have your experiences been? Please comment.