Remember when apps basically didn’t exist for phones? There were a handful but there was never a popular marketplace for mobile apps and success stories from developers were unheard of. It’s hard to believe this time existed only five years ago in 2007.
Fast forward to 2012 and consumers can’t get enough apps: over one billion downloads per month on average. More importantly, this has created what is now known as the app economy. Thousands of jobs have been created over the past five years for app development and the numbers are growing at an incredible rate.
According to a study from Michael Mandel of Atlantic, there are now 311,000 app jobs. These include everything from development to marketing to sales, so on and so forth. That’s slightly over double the amount of strictly technology-related jobs in the entire country: 155,000. Plus, that’s more jobs than the Internet publishing field, electronic shipping field, wireless carrier field, and software publishing field — that’s right, mobile apps have greater demand than desktop software.
The app economy can only grow as long as consumers keep buying smartphones. Thankfully, smartphone growth is anything but declining. In 2009, smartphones accounted for 18 percent of all mobile phones in use and the #1 handset at the time was the Motorola Razr V3. Last year, smartphone market share jumped to 44 percent and the #1 handset was the Apple iPhone 4.
The best part of all? This is only just the beginning.
