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Thanks to Tom Henderson from Crain’s Detroit Business News for including jacAPPS in their recent article: “Movin’ up with downloads.”

Here is an excerpt:

“According to a variety of industry watchers, the [mobile app] industry will continue to grow dramatically over the next few years. The worldwide technology research company Gartner projects the number of downloads to go from 8 billion in 2010 to 21 billion in 2013, and revenue from mobile-app stores worldwide to go from $6.2 billion to nearly $30 billion.

Those dollar figures are all the more impressive considering that estimates are that eight of 10 are free.

According to Bango Analytics of New York, which analyzes mobile traffic and marketing campaigns for businesses, app developers are fast moving away from the get-if-for-free model, with 45 percent of developers saying they plan to commercialize their apps directly, outside app stores.

Or, like jacAPPS LLC of Southfield, create apps, often at a cost of $20,000 to $30,000, for corporate clients. JacAPPS was spun off in July from Jacobs Media Inc., which does marketing and consulting for radio stations around the country. The company is by far the leading app developer in metro Detroit, with aggregate downloads of more than 11 million, and is looking for investors to help ramp up hiring and app development.

Tom Kinnear, a veteran angel investor and executive director of the UM’s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, said that while the app world has received a lot of attention lately, context is needed. “A lot of it has been overhyped and overvalued. There have been some successes, but, so far, very few people are making much money,” he said.

“It’s not like medical devices or diagnostics or enterprise software, which have made people a lot of money. You’re talking about 99-cent downloads on your phone. For the most part, it might make for a decent living, but it’s not anything on a major scale, yet,” he said.

One train of thought in the Internet/mobile world is that HTML 5, the newest hypertext markup language for the Internet, will over the next few years make websites so content rich, user friendly and able to run on low-power devices as smartphones and tablets that downloadable mobile apps will become obsolete.

Last week, however, tech blogger Rafe Needleman, a former editor at Red Herring magazine and now an editor at CNET.com, wrote that HTML 5 will actually boost app development.

While sales through app stores may decline, Adobe has started releasing high-quality HTML 5 developer tools, “so we should be about to see a flood of new Web-based mobile apps,” he wrote.

“I agree,” said Daichendt. “You read all the articles that better websites are going to make apps obsolete, but they won’t. HTML 5 will make mobile apps much more user friendly, across all platforms and phones.”

To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
To reach Tom Henderson: (313) 446-0337, thenderson@crain.com. Twitter: @tomhenderson2

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Apps, downloads, Mobile, Smartphones, Technology