More than $4.2 billion of revenues were generated by mobile applications in 2009, according to analyst firm Gartner.
The big winners? Apple and iPhone developers. Gartner's figures suggest that the App Store accounted for a stunning 99.4 per cent of those revenues.
The thinking runs thus: Apple did more than 2.5 billion downloads in 2009, according to Gartner's calculations. It thinks that every other mobile app store combined generated just 16 million.
This is paid downloads, so stores like GetJar - who will doubtless have something to say about the research later today - are presumably not included.
Meanwhile Nokia recently claimed it was doing more than one million downloads a day on Ovi Store - but that was for apps AND content (ringtones, wallpapers etc).
Gartner predicts that more than 4.5 billion apps will be downloaded this year across all platforms, generating $6.8 billion of sales. It estimates that this will climb to 21.6 billion downloads and $29.5 billion of revenues by 2013.
However, the firm thinks that a quarter of mobile app revenues will come from advertising in free apps, rather than paid downloads.
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