Gartner: 185B mobile app downloads by 2014

So, you thought Apple's 10 billion application downloads was a big number? Gartner says mobile users will download 17.7 billion applications from mobile app stores this year, a 117 percent year-over-year increase. Get this: 185 billion mobile apps downloaded from app stores by 2014. You believe that? I sure as hell don't. The mobile market is yet too volatile to forecast anything, but these analysts keep trying and keep changing their predictions every couple of months. Surely the "psychic reader" down the street could do no worse and charge much less money doing so.

I nitpick because, despite mobile apps early gains, the browser may yet prove to be the better way to consume mobile applications than specialized ones downloaded from app stores. Search as a utility looks to be the killer app for mobile devices, in part because of how differently people use cell phones than, say, PCs. The person who might spend hours in front of a PC, spends seconds or minutes at a time on a smartphone (though many more interactions). Phone behavior is more contextual and personal, where utility, such as finding the nearest Starbucks or playing Angry Birds while waiting for the bus, matters more.

But, hey, I could be just as wrong as Gartner. Strangely, no one will gripe in three years if the number of downloaded apps falls short of or even exceeds 185 billion. I think apps are today's fashionable choice -- that the app-centric model is transitional. Businesses and consumers love apps in part for their familiarity -- what they use on PCs. Developers love mobile apps because they're generally easier to create than desktop applications and there's more money to be made (its an economies of scale thing, there being so many more mobile than PC users).

Stephanie Baghdassarian, a Gartner research director doesn't agree. "Many are wondering if the app frenzy we have been witnessing is just a fashion, and, like many others, it shall pass. We do not think so," she said in a statement. "We strongly believe there is a sizable opportunity for application stores in the future."

Baghdassarian qualifies: "Applications will have to grow up and deliver a superior experience to the one that a web-based app will be able to deliver. Native apps will survive the web enhancements only when they will provide a more-personal and richer experience to the 'vanilla' experience that a Web-based app will deliver."

That's a helluva backdoor qualification. I contend that application and finger fatigue will prove fatal to the native mobile application "fashion" trend. The number of apps the average mobile user uses everyday will lessen and all that flicking from app to app will become tedious. Where web apps or search is as good or better, users will adopt what is easier and more convenient for the short bursts of time spent on their mobile devices.

To be fair, Gartner's forecast is partly based on a widening base, as more of the world's 5 billion cellular subscribers move from dumb phones and simple feature phones to web browser- and application-capable feature phones and smartphones. More devices means more mobile application downloads.

Returning to the crystal ball, Gartner forecasts that based on actual sales and supporting advertising, mobile applications will generate more than $15 billion revenue this year, up 190 percent from $5.2 billion in 2010. Sales revenue is from a smaller base: Gartner predicts that 81 percent of mobile app store downloads will be for free stuff. However, Gartner didn't qualify how many of these free downloads might generate additional in-app purchases or upgrades.

Not surprisingly, Gartner research vice president Carolina Milanesi said in a statement: "We estimate that Apple's App Store drove close to nine application downloads out of 10 in 2010 and will remain the single best-selling store across our forecast period (through 2014), although to a lesser extent, as other stores manage to gain momentum." Well, hell, I don't believe that either. Do you?