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Innovation

We'll download 160 billion apps in 2017. Is that good?

There will be no escaping the guy at the party who wants to show you his latest piece of little software.
Written by Mark Halper, Contributor
appspin-jeffreyflickr.jpg
The dizzying world of apps will spin out 160 billion downloads in 2017.

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Warning: By 2017 there will be no escaping the guy at the party who wants to show you his latest piece of little software.

That's because he'll be a model citizen in a world that according to Juniper Research will download 160 billion apps onto gadgets that year, twice as many as it will fetch this year when the app bore already lurks around every corner and near every pretzel bowl.

Nearly half of the apps will be games, many of which will allow users around the planet to play against each other in real time, Juniper predicts in a new report. Appolytes generally won't even have to pay to procure - 95 percent of the apps will be free. (Money will flow from advertising and "in-app" purchases, Portio Research explained recently when it predicted app revenue of $63.5 billion for 2017.)

With a global population of 7 billion, 160 billion apps is more than 20 per person. Imagine if just some of those bits and bytes could be, say, bowls of rice to feed the needy.

Increasingly, we are what we app. Sports used to be the opiate of the masses, now it's apps as well. With 160 billion packets of appiate out there, just think of all of the obsessive button pushing and anti-social screen time. The guy with the device in his pocket sure will be happy to see you.

Will we still be human at that point? Perhaps we will have evolved into a new subspecies of HumanBots, or HuBots. I'm going to try to get to the bottom of this. I'm sure there's an app that can help me figure it out.

Photo from Jeffrey via Flickr

More appy new years on SmartPlanet:

An altogether different juniper report:

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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