The best apps for your mobile According to Andrew Harrison, Carphone Warehouse's chief executive, "It's estimated that in 2012 alone, mobile users will download nearly 36 billion apps." Although this year the awards introduced new categories in, for instance, health and wellbeing, the majority of those apps downloaded will be the hugely popular games such as Angry Birds, offers app Groupon or picture editing programme Photoshop Express. Two key trends, however, emerge: the first is that while radical innovation sometimes does come from small app developers, in fact enormous companies such as Google and Facebook are continuing to drive much innovation in mobile apps. Facebook claims 400million mobile users and its main Google app has even reviewed by 3 million mobile users. Google's own Maps app surely won in its category in large part because of its sheer utility, but also because of its regular and relentless updates, with new features added routinely. The introduction, for instance, of full 3D mapping for huge swathes of central London is a result of investment that only major companies can possibly make. While apps were once built in bedrooms, now those that win awards seldom are. The second conspicuous trend, however, is the speed at which innovation in apps is continuing to race ahead: those that were shortlisted but did not win, such as music service Spotify, sometimes lost solely because they had lower adoption levels than, say, YouTube. New features in apps are offering visions of the future far sooner than we thought we would see them. So next year, there are very likely to be applications that use augmented reality and which share our locations more creatively than those that were nominated this year. Could it be useful, for instance, that Facebook users should know how close you are to an event you arranged with them on Facebook? That means a whole set of interesting new challenges on privacy and usability - but it also means we are likely features in just a year's time that we currently struggle to even envisage.