Mikey Campbell
A report released on Tuesday by TechNet (.pdf link) claims that the so-called "App Economy," a term coined in 2009 and brought into mainstream use by a November 2009 Business Week cover story, has grown beyond Apple's App Store to become an entity of its own that has seen steady growth over the past four years.
TechNet, a bipartisan political network of tech CEOs and Senior Executives, tapped consulting firm South Mountain Economics LLC to quantify the size and impact of the App Economy by researching keywords in help-wanted ads, want-ad to employment ratio, tech employment to total employment ratio and job multipliers. The study was meant to illustrate the effect innovation has on job creation, and is not limited to developers alone but also counts management, creative and other staff associated with app production.
What the company came up with was a detailed and surprising analysis of a fast-growing industry that is responsible for roughly 466,000 jobs in the U.S., and includes employment stats from "pure" app companies like Zynga as well as app-related positions from major software developers like Electronic Arts and AT&T.
Included in the study were statistics from the major mobile operating systems including Android, iOS, Blackberry, Facebook and the various iterations of what is now Microsoft's Windows Phone platform.
“The App Economy, along with the broad communications sector, has been a leading source of hiring strength in an otherwise sluggish labor market,†said the report’s author Dr. Michael Mandel, President of South Mountain Economics and former Chief Economist for BusinessWeek.
App Economy by the numbers. | Source: TechNet
California tops the list of states with the highest percentage of App Economy jobs recording nearly one in every four sector positions going to the new industry, and is followed by New York and Washington with 6.9 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively.
Growth for App business employment saw a relative slowdown in growth during 2011, though the average number of tech want ads containing the word "app" was 45 percent higher than the year before.
Source: TechNet
Apple recently announced that it had paid developers over $4 billion since the launch of the App Store, and the company's over 315 million iOS devices sold has helped software engineers make $700,000 during the last quarter alone.
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42 Comments
I'm upset these jobs aren't going to Foxconn workers¡
This is an interesting rebuttal to the New York times piece, specifically this:
"Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple?s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple?s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/bu...dle-class.html
Although it is doubtful the "App Economy" jobs are the high-wage, stable union jobs of the 1950s, they're still jobs.
I can't believe it! I mean I can believe it! I was just wishing for figures like this yesterday!
The Apple effect begins to be felt and measured. The computer-in-your-pocket revolution is going to be bigger than the first one in the 80s and 90s.
Ok, it's not just Apple, but they really started it with their pocket Internet browser that just happened to be a phone, in 2007. And I guess the tablet is really the computer in your hand, but it's ten times more accessible than a laptop.
I'm upset these jobs aren't going to Foxconn workers.
I'm upset these jobs aren't going to Foxconn workers.
You better add the /sarcasm tag before noobs roast you LOL