Developing, maintaining and marketing mobile apps has turned into big business.
You might not have noticed it, but mobile applications [2] are embedding themselves not only into our lives, but also into our economy. According to data from a TechNet survey [3], 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 [4].
