The Mobile-App Economy Created 466,000 New Jobs, but What’s Next?
Developing, maintaining and marketing mobile apps has turned into big business.
You might not have noticed it, but mobile applications are embedding themselves not only into our lives, but also into our economy. According to data from a TechNet survey, the mobile-application business has created 466,000 jobs in the United States — that’s up from zero in 2007.
Tracking the history of mobile applications in a handy infographic, Frugal Dad pulls this factoid along with some other informative tidbits on the journey the smartphone has taken to mobile-app riches.
A few highlights include:
- The first mobile applications offered were calendar, clock, notepad, calculator, address book and more in the IBM Simon Personal Communicator in 1993.
- Apple’s App Store, which launched in 2008, makes up 85 percent of the revenue in the mobile-app market.
- The App Store hit 15 million downloads as of July 2011.
- 57 percent of Google’s Android apps are free, compared with Apple’s 28 percent.
- The most popular app categories are games, weather, shopping, maps, news and banking.
Check out the infographic on the mobile-app economy below via Mashable.
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