In the rapidly evolving smartphone industry, it is important to stay up-to-date with the latest market trends. A recent Nielsen Wire study brings to light two important statistics that you should consider if you're thinking about developing event apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone.

Nielsen reports that iPhone and Android now cover over 85% of the smartphone market, and that 2 out of every 3 Americans who acquired a new mobile phone in the last three months chose a smartphone over a feature phone. This means that the smartphone adoption rate is primed to increase significantly within the next few years, up from the current rate, which hovers around 50%.

Take a look at the graph below.

You can see that within the last three months, the market share for iOS and Android has continued to increase steadily.

Now take a look at the chart below, which illustrates how much the smartphone market share has changed from 2011 to 2012.

You can see that within just this past year, Blackberry’s market share has dropped from 20% to 9%, while Windows 7’s has dropped from 9% to 4.3%. Blackberry has lost even more ground in the running average over the last few months, and Windows 7 hasn’t made any significant progress either. Most likely, Windows 7 will continue to lose ground until Windows 8 is released later this year.

If you're looking at solutions to build your event apps for iPhone or its competitors, these are statistics worth considering. . Given that Android and iPhone are dominating the market, it makes much more sense to choose an app that is native to these two platforms and available as a web-based version on all the other platforms (Blackberry, Windows 7, etc.).

One last fact that you should consider is that RIM is targeting Blackberry 10 for release early next year. Blackberry 10 is an entirely new Blackberry OS that runs Android apps via a compatibility layer. This means that apps native to Android will run on Blackberry 10 devices and will be listed in Blackberry App World. This goes to show that choosing an app native to Android and iPhone will ensure that you have the vast majority of your audience covered.

In any case, it’s always a good idea to do some research before settling on an app. Hopefully, these statistics will help you make a more informed choice!

To read the full Nielsen Wire report, visit:

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/two-thirds-of-new-mobile-buyers-now-opting-for-smartphones/