The mobile applications market is big business, and a recent study shows that it is going to get even bigger by 2012. According to an article over on the BBC, a study performed by Getjar shows that the mobile applications market will grow to $17.5 billion by 2012.

Apparently the study also states that application downloads which last year were at 7 billion will climb to 50 billion by the year 2012 which is a year on year increase of 92 percent.

The study also found that there has been a type of ‘gold rush’ with mobile app stores as back in 2008 there were 4 app store and today that number has reached 48. Furthermore the study suggests that Apple’s domination of the applications market could come under challenge.

Founder and CEO of Getjar, Ilia Laurs has said that they wanted to find the real value of the industry as we felt segments such as the iPhone were being over-hyped and feature phones were being under-hyped.