A study released last week suggests that the market for mobile device software programs will be worth $US17.5 billion ($18.9 billion Australian) dollars within three years-$US4 billion more than the expected return from the sale of music CDs.

According to the independent study commissioned by GetJar, the world’s second largest application store, downloads of mobile phone applications wills jump in number from just over seven billion last year to almost 50 billion by 2012.

The world’s largest application store is that run by Apple from its iTunes website. Chief executive Steve Jobs announced earlier in the year that he now sees Apple as a “mobile devices company”, highlighting the importance of the mobile market for the technology giant.

GetJar chief executive Ilja Laurs agrees. In a recent interview with AFP, Laurs said, "It is easy to see how mobile apps will eclipse the traditional desktop internet."

"It makes perfect sense that mobile devices will kill the desktop."

According to the study report, mobile applications have been around since the late 1990s but didn’t really boom until Apple launched its App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch devices half way through 2008.

The current annual market for mobile phone apps is $6 billion Australian dollars, and applications offered by various companies include programs that use the camera, touch-screen, geo-tagging and other features of a mobile phone.

The Apple App Store reportedly has over 150,000 iPhone applications available for users, while GetJar offers more than 65,000 applications designed to be used on many different handsets.

Google has also started developing applications for its new Android mobile phone software. The current Android Marketplace has over 30,000 applications for smartphone running on that particular operating system.