TechNet Study Shows App Economy One Gigantic Job Creator
The bipartisan organization of top technology executives known as TechNet has recently found that jobs that fall under the "App Economy" umbrella number in the six digits: 466,000 people in the USA alone. This study concludes that software applications for smartphones, tablets, and Facebook combined have created nearly 500,000 new jobs in the United States since 2005. This rapid increase of jobs from this environment spells good news for the technology world and especially the mobile world where app creation reigns supreme.
It is California that leads the states with app-related jobs, it holding a whopping 25% of all App Economy jobs in the United States. New York is the top metropolitan area for app-related jobs, but the combined efforts of San Jose and San Francisco California trump New York in numbers. The study held no reservations about how burgeoning the market is in this sector, calling it nothing short of a phenomenon:
"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. On an economic level, each app represents jobs — for programmers, for user interface designers, for marketers, for managers, for support staff." – TechNet
Rey Ramsey, president and chief executive of TechNet, decidedly pinned the success on how quickly these developers and the manufacturers behind the hardware they develop for can innovate. Hundreds of thousands of workers here in the United States work in the App Economy, and TechNet pins the start of this economy on the year Apple introduced the iPhone. The iTunes-based App Store now has over 500,000 applications for the iPhone and the iPad combined, and no small amount of workers in the App Economy work for iDevices completely exclusively.
Then there's Facebook which the study noted contains at least 182,000 app related jobs. Another study done by University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business is noted as racking up as many as 235,644 jobs counted working in or around Facebook for the App Economy – these are "more aggressive estimates" of course. Let's keep this crazy ship sailing forward! Jobs for everyone!
[via AFP]