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UK Is Leading In App Economy And How The Rest Of The World Doing?

App development world is big and increasing in value every year. In Europe, there are 743.1 million people with strong middle class. This means better access to internet and mobile means greater chances of the flourishing mobile industry. A recent survey concluded that the UK is the leader in app development world comparing to Germany, France, and other European countries. It is problem, why? No body knows what that means.

App economy will be the leader in job creation in the near future. According to Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), more than 330000 people are directly/indirectly associated with the app development industry. Before the survey, Italy was supposed to be the front runner due to Apple development center in Naples.

PPI survey shows that the United Kingdom has the best eco system in the Entire Europe Union countries including Switzerland and Norway. Total number of jobs are 1.7 million, while major jobs are granted by iOS and Android is lagging behind with just 500,000 jobs (this is balanced by the outsourcing from cheaper countries)

France and Germany are having the 2nd and 3rd position with 209k and 163k iOS jobs comparing that with 242k jobs in iOS and 206k jobs in Android in the UK.

Well the UK lags behind many other companies in the app development jobs stats. It is 1.9% in Finland(highest in Europe), with 1.6% to Norway and 2.4 % in California.The report has multiple ambiguous parts while comparing to real time jobs. As the report has placed everything from project planners to security engineers in the survey. This definition does not make sense as multiple traits do not count in the ‘app economy jobs’ according to other parts surveys like SEMI and Dute-S.

To make the report worse, PPI have included salespersons, marketing managers, human resources jobs plus the actual ‘directly related’ app roles. It does not stop there, it also features retail and restaurant people that have direct roles with the front end interfaces with mobile applications.

PPI has a strong argument to support its report, “we assume that each core App Economy job is associated with two additional jobs (indirect and spillover jobs combined). Once again, this is a conservative assumption compared to other studies”, which means PPI is accepting about wooly nature of the survey and creating confusion rather than coming up exact numbers.

Apple official numbers say that Apple has more than 6700 employees and 640,000 developers in the UK alone. To get the clear numbers, there are multiple other attempts had been made. Surprisingly with different results. Tech City UK (a non-profit organization for creating and promoting digital jobs founded in 2010) give numbers around 1.5 million jobs (for whole Europe). Another report by Vision Mobile shows other numbers of 830,000 jobs with 8000 active companies. Which is double compared to the numbers mentioned by PPI.

Getting hard numbers is difficult but Apple store has published earnings mentioning £54.86bn payouts to developers by 2017 throughout the world. In Europe £14.34bn in total since its launch in 2008 and this number was half by the end of 2014. In 2016, total payout to developers was 20$ billion . On average, it is 100% increase in the revenues each year. While the numbers for Android are not solid but generally, apple pays more to developers. By now, iOS is leading the race but Google Play is expected to beat by the end of this year. Another report by appanie says US, China, Japan, South Korea, and the UK will have 84% share in the revenues compared with 75% today.

According to another report published by a leading mobile application development company based in Los Angeles California has expected to increase the Apple store revenues by 40% percent till 2018, this number will drop to 36% by 2020 and will drop to 31% by 2023. The increase will be stabilized around 2030 with numbers around 10-15% growth. By far, the increase in revenues is achieved by US, Japan, China. And numbers will strongly defy, if other emerging countries with big population joined the race here including India, African Countries or Indonesia. These numbers match with appannie numbers, which expect the total revenues will touch 139$ billion(combining revenues of every mobile store on the face of the earth) and consumers will be going to spend 60$ billion on Apple and big share will go to Android.

In the long term future, there is bad news for Apple, as its revenues in China has declined by 10% in the year 2016. Reasons behind this decline includes high costs(as growing countries can’t afford 1000$ phone), lack of innovation and open source of the code.

These numbers are extremely satisfying, as more jobs are getting lost due to economic downturn because of the Brexit. Digital economy will be going to play a crucial role in the next 10 years. As those will be the limelight in Stores growth and revenues.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Phylis Blincoe .