Image courtesy of Ars Technica

It may come as little surprise to iPhone and iPod touch users, but new data from market research firm Gartner proposes that Apple’s App Store walked away with almost all of the mobile app sales last year.

Ars Technica is reporting on the new Gartner numbers, which show that Apple almost completely dominates the mobile app market, “grabbing almost every one of the 4.2 billion dollars spent on mobile apps in 2009.” Things continue to look good for this year as well -- despite the continued competition from Android and WebOS devices, Apple and the App Store are expected to maintain two-thirds of the market, if current market trends continue.

The App Store launched alongside iPhone OS 2.0 and the iPhone 3G in July, 2008 and quickly hit 300 million apps sold by that December. Apple reported earlier this month that number had already jumped to 3 billion, which equates to something like 2.5 billion apps sold in 2009 alone.

Gartner estimates that another 16 million apps have been sold from all other mobile platforms combined, which is how they arrived at the 99.4 percent estimate.

“As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads,” explains Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner. “Games remain the number one application, and mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money.”

According to the Gartner chart above, the company is predicting a virtual explosion of the mobile app market between now and 2013, with 21.6 billion apps sold and a whopping $29.5 billion in revenue. Of those, the firm predicts that 25 percent of that revenue will be advertising-generated.

“Growth in smartphone sales will not necessarily mean that consumers will spend more money, but it will widen the addressable market for an offering that will be advertising-funded,” Baghdassarian concludes. Considering Apple’s recent acquisition of mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless, their future continues to look bright indeed.