GetJar is an independent mobile software store that has raised $25 million in funding from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners. GetJar has a major focus on pushing into the Android market. “GetJar plans to aggressively expand its offering to Android publishers in order to secure its position as the premier ‘open’ Android Market alternative,” stated GetJar. [Reuters]

GetJar is a mobile app store that has seen over one billion applications downloaded so far across 70,000 apps. GetJar has raised $11 million in funding recently. GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs likes to call his company the “Wal-Mart for mobile apps.” GetJar has deals in place with Sprint and Rogers. GetJar is profitable and makes money from “premium visibility” according to paidContent. The funding was provided by Accel Partners. [paidContent]

According to an independent study by GetJar, the mobile application market should hit $17.5 billion in three years. “It is easy to see how mobile apps will eclipse the traditional desktop Internet,” stated GetJar chief executive Ilja Laurs in an interview with the AFP. “It makes perfect sense that mobile devices will kill the desktop.”
Apple hosts about 150,000 applications and GetJar has about 65,000 mini applications across 310,000 developers.  About 842 million downloads of applications have been recorded on m.GetJar.com. [AFP]

Ilja Laurs, CEO of of GetJar, a top independent app store, said that apps will be as big if not bigger than the Internet at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. He said that the economics of mobile apps are a different story. According to him, roughly 90% of app developers fail. He says there are simply too many applications out at the time.

Apple’s App store now hosts over 65,000 applications. Its very hard to reach the top of a category when you are competing against that many apps. Most top selling iPhone apps are a one hit wonder. They get popular for a short time and then lose traction. So its becoming increasingly difficult to build a solid business model around the App store.

Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation thinks that that Apple’s current App store is flawed because its a mixed bag of apps. He feels that there are simply too many low quality apps in the store.

Google on the other hand feels that the App store is a fad. Google says that consumers will set their focus away from native mobile apps to browser based apps.

Via

Sony Ericsson has partnered with application store company GetJar.  The partnership gives Ericsson users access to 45,000 free applications.  The applications are part of the GetJar PlayNow arena.

“With its experience in delivering mobile applications to a wide consumer base, GetJar has demonstrated the value of choice, quality and performance when it comes to distributing mobile content,” stated Sony Ericsson Head of Developer & Partner Engagement Christopher David. “In the rapidly growing mobile content market, partnering with GetJar will allow us to complement the quality application offerings of our mobile content and entertainment service PlayNow arena.”

The GetJar app store has about 450 million downloads.  The company has about 45,000 mobile applications available for download.  GetJar is backed by Accel Partners.

[via MobileBurn]