What is the future of the global App Economy? The average person already spends hours each day on mobile applications, connecting with friends and relatives, watching news and entertainment, playing games, and doing daily tasks such as shopping and banking. People will use apps to interact with their cars, to connect with their health care. Artificial intelligence, low latency and high bandwidth 5G connections, virtual/mixed reality, intensive data processing and on-device machine learning will give rise to entire new categories of mobile applications. Individuals and businesses will become ever-more dependent on mobile apps for their daily lives.
Australia is a key player in the evolving global App Economy. Australian-based app developers with a strong global presence include Sydneybased Canva, the online design and visual communication platform with more than 130 million monthly users across 190 countries. In 2022, Tasmania-based Savage Interactive won an Apple Design Award for its art app Procreate, and Melbourne-based Studio Drydock won for its game Wylde Flowers. Gold Coast-based Desygner, known for its graphic design apps and brand management software, has more than 20 million users worldwide. And Melbourne-based fintech app Afterpay, acquired by Block, the parent company of Square, in January 2022, is still hiring extensively in Australia, based on its job postings.
Looking forward, the Australian App Economy is a potent source of future jobs, since developing, updating, maintaining and securing mobile apps is becoming even more important. None of these jobs existed 15 years ago, when Apple first opened the App Store on July 10, 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis. Android Market (which later became Google Play) was announced by Google shortly after. These app stores created a new route through which software developers could write programs for smartphones. These mobile applications —called “apps” — could then be distributed to the rapidly growing number of smartphone users around the world.
The jobs generated by the app stores became an important part of the recovery from the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the subsequent economic expansion and the response to the pandemic. More than that, app development and the app stores became a key route by which young people can develop tech skills and became an integral part of the global digital economy.
In this paper we estimate 182,000 App Economy jobs for Australia, as of August 2023, and compare it to previous PPI estimates. We estimate the size of the iOS and Android ecosystems. We compare Australia’s App Intensity with other industrialized countries, where App Intensity is defined as the number of App Economy jobs as a share of total employment. Finally, we also give some examples of App Economy jobs, with special attention to export-oriented jobs.
