Two recent analyst reports demonstrate that the market for both Smartphones and mobile Apps are on course for robust growth in the coming year.

Last week, Gartner released data predicting that the market for app downloads is set to exceed $15 billion in 2011.

It’s no surprise that the principle benefactors in this app land-grab are forecast to be Apple and Google’s Android, with Gartner predicting that the latter would become the world’s most popular smarphone operating system in the next 12 months.

According to Canalys, Google has already reached that milestone, with shipments of its Android based handsets running at 32.9 million in Q4 2010, surpassing Nokia’s Symbian-based 31.0 million units.

 But among all this talk of telephone number growth, Gartner issues a word of caution to app vendors – Stephanie Baghdassarian, Gartner Research Director warns that apps will have to ‘grow up’ by offering a superior service and performance on Smartphones compared to the one experienced  on web-based applications.

With our CoPilot Live heritage firmly grounded in the development of navigation software specifically for mobile devices of all shapes and sizes, we are inclined to agree with Gartner’s conclusion. As the market grows and Smartphone devices evolve, it’s our number one objective to provide our customers with the very best navigation experience on as many of these devices as possible.