Mobile Phone Blog:

Apple dominated the applications market with 99.4 per cent sales last year, after more than 2.5 million were downloaded overall.

According to research by Gartner, $4.2 billion (£2.5 billion) was spent downloading apps in 2009.

The research and advisory company predicts that consumers will spend around $6.2 billion (£3.8 billion) on the features in 2010.

Forecasts claim more than 4.5 billion apps will be downloaded this year, with free downloads making up 82 per cent of the figure.

Looking further ahead, Gartner expects application sales to top 21.6 billion in 2013, with free downloads totalling 87 per cent.

Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner, said: "As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads."

She noted that games are the number one application downloaded by consumers and that there was an increase in mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools.

Apple opened its first app store in July 2008.

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