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.
For Turkey, the evolving App Economy is a potent source of future jobs since developing, updating, maintaining and securing mobile apps is becoming even more important. Turkey already has 112,000 App Economy jobs, according to PPI’s new estimate (presented in this paper). 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.1 Android Market (which later became Google Play) was announced by Google shortly after.2 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 global economic expansion. 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 the number of App Economy jobs for Turkey, as of August 2023. We calculate the size of the iOS and Android ecosystems for Turkey. We compare Turkey’s App Economy to other peer countries.
