Less than 1 per cent of consumer apps will be considered a financial success by their developers from now until 2018, research firm Gartner predicted.

Consumers are increasingly making use of recommendation engines, friends, social networks and advertising to discover apps, rather than trawling through app stores, meaning more apps may never be discovered.

As a result, Gartner forecasts that in 2018, less than 0.01 per cent of consumer mobile apps will be seen as financially successful by their developers.

Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said most mobile apps are not generating profit, although a huge number of titles are still being brought to market by developers.

Indeed many apps are not designed to generate revenue but rather to build brand recognition or are just for fun. “Application designers who do not recognise this may find profits elusive,” Dulaney said.

Gartner forecast that 94.5 per cent of downloads in 2017 will be free, up from 91 per cent in 2013. This will mean freemium apps that generate revenue through advertising and in-app purchases will become more important.

The analyst firm previously projected that 48 per cent of all app revenue in 2017 would be via in-app purchases, compared to 17 per cent in 2013.

Even when users shell out for apps, Gartner found that 90 per cent of paid apps are downloaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 each day. “This is only going to get worse in the future when there will be even greater competition, especially in successful markets,” he said.

As well as the growing importance of freemium apps, the amount of high-quality free apps has raised expectations about what paid apps should offer and what users should pay for, Dulaney noted.

Gartner also addressed the future of HTML5 in mobile app development. While it is “the best option for a widely available, platform-neutral application delivery technology” the firm said developers will continue to be challenged by performance, fragmentation and immaturity issues for several years.

But, with more than 100 “platform independent” development tools with technical or commercial compromises, there will be increasing interest in HTML5 “as a somewhat-standardised, widely available, platform-neutral delivery technology”.