Yesterday I posted that Apple’s iPhone business was larger than all of Microsoft. Some of you said, “well good for them, but what about us?” Today, I’ve found a report that indicates that nearly half a million programmer jobs/small businesses have been created by people programming apps for devices like the Apple iPhone and iPad since 2007!
Where the Jobs Are: The App Economy [PDF]:
The incredibly rapid rise of smartphones, tablets, and social media, and the applications-“apps”-that run on them, is perhaps the biggest economic and technological phenomenon today. Almost a million apps have been created for the iPhone, iPad and Android alone, greatly augmenting the usefulness of mobile devices.
On an economic level, each app represents jobs-for programmers, for user interface designers, for marketers, for managers, for support staff. But how many? Conventional employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are not able to track such a new phenomenon. So in this paper we analyze detailed information from The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine database, a comprehensive and up-to-the-minute compilation of want ads, to estimate the number of jobs in the App Economy.
This analysis shows that the App Economy now is responsible for roughly 466,000 jobs in the United States, up from zero in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced.