11
of the app economy revenue. Besides, 26% of app developers are engaged in developing apps
on commission
. Other revenue generating activities include in-app advertising, e-commerce
and other activities that support app development such as app analytics which are a small but
rapidly growing segment of the app economy.
Given the newness of the app economy and its linkages with several other industries,
estimating its employment impact using standard econometric approaches is difficult. The
app economy’s networked nature makes it clear that employment generated in this sunrise
sector is not limited to developers but more significantly spills over upstream and
downstream to telecom, internet service providers, mobile device manufacturers, etc. which
comprise the app ecosystem. CTIA – The Wireless Association and the Application
Developers Alliance published a report in 2012 estimating that the app economy in the US
has created 519,000 jobs as of April 2012.
CTIA used online want ads that were looking for
app economy skills. A list of key words
and phrases were put together to identify ads
related to app economy jobs. A sample based validation was carried out for the selected ads
to ensure that they truly represented app economy jobs. The study found that each ad
corresponded to roughly 7.2 core app economy jobs.
In addition, non-tech jobs were
estimated to be almost equal in number.
Replicating this methodology for India would be
impractical since there isn’t any comparable sophisticated source of information for
employment opportunities that could help isolate demand for app related jobs. Web based
companies like Naukri and Monster at best provide trends in the job market. Arriving at
results using data from these sources will result in a specious estimate.
The other estimate of employment attributable to apps is the ACT4Apps study for Europe
.
It shows that the app economy created 794,000 jobs in 28 EU countries, of which 529,000 or
two-thirds are direct jobs. The remainder includes a host of non-technology jobs such as
management, sales, customer service, accounts, finance, etc.This is in contrast to the US
where half the jobs are direct
. In the US study a multiplier of 1.5 was assumed to quantify
the spill over into other sectors. For the EU, the assumed multiplier is 0.66 and both these
might be underestimates as higher employment impacts have been estimated in other studies.
In particular, a survey based analysis by Mulligan and Card
finds that the EU app-developer
workforce stands at 1 million and the total app market employment is 1.8 million as per 2013
data reflecting a multiplier of 1.8.
Vision Mobile, Developer Economics Q1 2014, State of the Developer Nation, Retrieved from
http://www.visionmobile.com/product/developer-economics-q1-2014-state-developer-nation/
Ibid.
Mandel, M. and Schere J. (2012), “The Geography of the App Economy”, CTIA – The Wireless Association
and Application Developers Alliance
Some of these words included Android, Blackberry API, iOS, IpAd, IPhone, etc.
Core App Economy jobs correspond to Direct Employment in the App economy. It refers to job profiles
related to developing, maintaining, and supporting applications for different platforms.
Several limitations to this study have been identified, including sample size, time of survey, etc.
The European App Economy: Creating Jobs and Driving Growth, September 2013 by Vision Mobile and
Plum Consulting. Study sponsored by ACT4Apps
The findings of the ACT 4 Apps report is based on Vision Mobile’s Q3 2013 Developer Economics global
survey which consists of more than 6000 responses
Mark Mulligan and David Card (2014), “Sizing the EU App Economy” Gigaom Research