US App Industry Employs Nearly 500,000 People

For an industry that pretty much didn’t exist 5 years ago, the mobile app creation market is huge. A new report puts the number of workers working on apps at ~466,000, and growing rapidly.

Oh, and mobile apps are believed to have pumped $20 billion into the economy, for those doubting the size of the market.

Growth from Nowhere

Before the iPhone came out in late 2007, there were virtually no mobile app developers. Windows Phone was really the only true smartphone platform, and Popcap was almost the only company specializing in mobile phone game development.

But the iPhone changed everything. Within months of the release of the app store, there were mobile app millionaires. Their games were simple, back then; one man managed to become a millionaire off of an artillery clone, another was a simple puzzle game. But it was clear that the market was there, and money (and talent) flooded in. Soon you began seeing true productivity apps and other, more esoteric ones, leading up to today, where your smartphone can do much of what your desktop can, in your pocket.

Not Slowing Down

The app market doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Both iOS and Android have been seeing serious growth, with Android alone seeing 700,000 activations a day. Most of those activations will buy at least one app. More smartphones are now being sold than laptops and desktops.

Tablets are becoming extremely popular, so much so that Microsoft has retooled Windows to suit them. All in all, I expect that we will hit the next milestone, 1 million people employed, in half the time it took us to reach 500,000 employees in the US, say, by 2014.

TheNextWeb Photo by : Doug Belshaw