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Businesses IOS Apple

Apple Says iOS Apps Created Estimated 300,000 US Jobs Since April 2019 (cnet.com) 42

Apple on Wednesday highlighted the estimated number of US jobs created by its iOS app ecosystem. It comes as the company battles Fortnite developer Epic over App Store commission rates, which can be as high as 30%. From a report: The iOS app economy has created almost 300,000 new jobs since April 2019 and supports more than 2.1 million US jobs across all 50 states,Apple estimated in a blog post that cited research by Washington DC-based think tank Progressive Policy Institute. Most of these jobs are concentrated in states on the East and West Coasts, as well as Texas, while the Midwest has the fewest. Apps have proven critical for Americans adapting to life during the coronavirus pandemic, Apple said, whether it's ordering food remotely, stay-at-home education or telehealth. As a result, it noted that developers' jobs have remained sustainable even as many Americans lose their jobs.
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Apple Says iOS Apps Created Estimated 300,000 US Jobs Since April 2019

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  • Split (Score:5, Funny)

    by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2020 @11:17AM (#60465964)

    It splits out in 200k new lawyers, 100k advertising and micropayment optimization specialists, and the rest is all new developers!

    • by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      Don't worry, once they ban the Unreal Engine from all Apple platforms, they can create even more developer jobs for people to port iOS Unreal games (and, yes, they exist) to Unity! See, it's not anti-trust, it's job creation!

    • It splits out in 200k new lawyers, 100k advertising and micropayment optimization specialists, and the rest is all new developers!

      Whew. I was worried they'd thawed enough of Steve's sperm to impregnate 300K women.

      "CA wildfires force PG&E rolling blackouts which cut power to the Jobs' Freezer Array (JFA) causing 300K Jobs of sperm (JoS) to need to be immediately used" sounds so 2020.

  • Not alone (Score:2, Insightful)

    I'm pretty sure Uber and Lyft would say the same. That doesn't mean that they haven't created a predatory system where they take advantage of the people they "help".

    Drug trafficking has also created a lot of jobs. That doesn't make it acceptable. Creating jobs does not excuse breaking the law (not to mention profiteering off those jobs).

  • Blatant Lie (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2020 @11:27AM (#60466030)

    This is just a fraudulent claim.

    Creating jobs means those jobs didn't already exist. Just because that many developers spend at least part of their time working on apps, doesn't mean the app platform "created" their jobs. In fact, if the phone had a different OS, there would be the same apps, and the same developers would be working for the same companies.

    • Conflating net and gross is something that happens a lot.

      I remember my dad saying (decades ago) that you could hardly pay a CEO too much, because their decisions could change the revenues of a company by many millions of dollars. But that's not the same as growing the total economy by millions of dollars. When a company grows it is presumably because they're at least a bit better than the competition, so they probably are growing the pie by some amount compared to if they didn't exist. But in almost al

      • This isn't even that. This is claiming credit for your client's business, and claiming that you created all your client's jobs.

        This is way, way more fraudulent than just conflating gross and net.

    • If iOS did not exist, it could be argued that -Add to Home Screen- would be the new installation method. Being brutally honest, Google would have killed native apps in favour of web-first experiences by now if there wasnâ(TM)t strong competition. We can see this by how aggressively standards like WebUSB and CDN friendly signed asset bundle ideas are being pushed by Google. This is to eliminate the need for native code which doesnâ(TM)t run through their glorified virtual machine. So can we cal
    • So, surely you can discuss the actual methodology used to compute those statistics and explain why they're wrong, rather than just making one up to argue against, right?

      • Try again, but keep the thread all the way from where you have an idea, to where you've said words that include it.

        It was something about statistics you think were made up. Give it a few hours, you'll remember.

        I was talking about the Law of Identity. I am Me. I am not You. You are you. You are not me. Apple is not the software company creating jobs that employ the programmers who wrote the 3rd party apps in the app store.

        As another example, 7-11 is not Guinness, and 7-11 does not get credit for any of the j

        • Wow. That is a big pile of bullshit. I didn't say you made up statistics— I said you criticized the way they calculated those statistics even though you clearly don't know. Try to keep up. It was a one-sentence comment.

          • I said you criticized the way they calculated those statistics even though you clearly don't know. Try to keep up. It was a one-sentence comment.

            That isn't what I said, moron. That's what you call "keeping up?" Falling in the ditch and forgetting what was said? Or did you fail to even comprehend it in the first place?

            • Your response is complete gibberish and you know it. The funny thing about people who can't help but throw around insults when they're arguing is that they think it somehow emphasizes the righteousness or increases the impact of their argument, but to literally everybody else, it's an completely transparent display of intellectual insecurity. There's no more efficient way of screaming to the world "I'm out of my depth and can't actually argue my point like a reasonable adult."

  • Now imagine how many more opportunities there would be if iOS apps weren't artificially restricted to the App Store.
  • Nearly every major and most minor Apps today has an iOS and an Android Port of the same product.
    I expect a good portion of the Jobs, would also be working to make the product work on Android too. So Apple isn't the economic driver, but general mobile development it.

    It would be like Crediting Microsoft for my Job, because I happen to sometimes write code in .NET If Microsoft or .NET wasn't available I would still be doing my job but just for a different target.

    • Maybe you canâ(TM)t credit Microsoft but me and many other IT professionals can. My job has never felt more secure knowing that their agile development cycles break things just frequently enough to justify my pay check ;-)
      • I guess I am a more conservative coder. I tend to try to make my code as easily portable to different languages, and avoid using 3rd party libraries, It sometimes takes extra work, however it pays off because I cannot trust the 3rd party lib to survive the next update.

  • And since February, some 36 million Americans *LOST* their jobs thanks to COVID19. More than half of those have not yet found other employment.

    So.... uhmm... yeah, kudos to Apple and all that for job creation, but honestly, I don't think this is the time to be bragging about it.

  • Given that Apple takes a third of what these people earn I don't feel especially good about the news.

  • by xgerrit ( 2879313 ) on Wednesday September 02, 2020 @11:58AM (#60466166)

    I was curious and looked up the statistics There are somewhere between 2.8 million [slashdot.org] and 20 million [slashdot.org] (or more) iOS developers. Apple says they paid out $35 billion to developers in 2019 [slashdot.org].

    So developers on average are getting paid somewhere between $1750 to $12,500 a year. Of course most of the money Apple pays out goes to companies like Netflix and Spotify, so for an average developer it's less than that. And Apple charges for developer accounts and placement in the App Store search results. Plus, there are no benefits and the income is completely unreliable.

    Honestly, it seems disingenuous to even describe the situation they've created as "a job". It's more like they took $100 from 300,000 people to sell them a pipe dream and are now trying to spin it as a social good.

    • by thogard ( 43403 )

      You also need a current Mac and iDevices to develop apps so those costs should be offset against those amounts. If there are issues of international payouts vs US developer numbers, things are much worse. There had been other slashdot articles indicating the average developer pay is very highly skewed and most developers that do get paid will get less than $100.

  • OK, so a monopolist employs some people and provides a good or service that enables other businesses to operate. Since when did that give them a pass on enforcement of antitrust law?

    300,000 new jobs? Even assuming that's correct: How many MORE jobs, and how much more wealth in the hands of others, would be created without them taking a full 30% haircut of the gross revenue of the ENTIRE MARKET? How much more if they couldn't ban applications that don't meet their rules and interpretations of them?

    • It would be far fewer jobs because if Apple couldn't take a nice profit for itself, it wouldn't bother running the App Store. Just like Google, Microsoft, Sony and all the others that run digital product stores. Hardly anyone goes into business for purely altruistic motives.

      • It would be far fewer jobs because if Apple couldn't take a nice profit for itself, it wouldn't bother running the App Store.

        Captive markets = fewer jobs... Also down is up, good is bad and elephant poop smells like roses.

        Captive markets don't create jobs neither do they benefit manufacturers or customers. They are anti-competitive parasites that suck jobs and profits from the system to benefit captors without providing much of any value in return.

        • Except it is not a captive market. It is a market open to anyone willing to pay $100, part with 30% of their sale price and abide by other perfectly reasonable rules.

          And the $1.8 billion that Fortnite took in during just 2019 was done through stores on multiple platforms that take a similar cut of their v-bucks sale price. So the assertion you make is not only generally wonky but specifically demonstrated as really really wrong.

          • Except it is not a captive market. It is a market open to anyone willing to pay $100, part with 30% of their sale price and abide by other perfectly reasonable rules.

            It fits the definition of a captive market therefore it is a captive market.

            Consumers have no choice where they can buy a particular product from. They can't choose to buy software for their iPhones from a different supplier. A single supplier has a MONOPOLY on the sale of all software for the iPhone.

            What the terms are or whether or not you personally believe they are "reasonable" is completely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not it constitutes a captive market.

            And the $1.8 billion that Fortnite took in during just 2019 was done through stores on multiple platforms that take a similar cut of their v-bucks sale price. So the assertion you make is not only generally wonky but specifically demonstrated as really really wrong.

            This is ridiculous on its face. It's

    • ^^^ This. (Where are my mod points when I need them?)

  • Oh how altruistic of Apple to create these jobs. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that they take 30% of it? Just saying.
  • Yeah, like Tim isn't known for using fudged graph axes.
  • That's like saying Indeed or Linked-In created 1 million jobs this year just because they listed them. Or that Lenovo created millions of jobs because they sold people laptops that they use for MS Office or writing code. Oh, thank you MicroSoft and Comcast! Oh, and then there's the 30% "protection fee". Epic Games didn't want any of it so now Apple is trying to wack them. I Hope Epic wins so big over Apple that they own them in the end. Apple's walled-garden model is the biggest trap for idiots -- why the _
  • My understanding is that the vast majority of iPhone apps never sell enough make a profit, and the 30% cut makes it that much harder. Eight years ago BusinessInsider.com estimated that just 0.1% of iPhone apps were hits. Does anybody have recent statistics on what percentage of people who are involved in creating iPhone apps actually make a living doing so? I've been involved in creating apps for iPhone, but only as a free native equivalent of a service-based or retail web site, not as something people w

  • ... that the Genius Bars were so busy.

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  • How many of these Jobs were named Steve?

  • Think how many more jobs there would be if Apple reduced it's cut from 30% to 10%!
  • They didnâ(TM)t create jobs. That is ridiculous. They did force people with jobs to sell their software products on the apple app store in order to reach ios users. Nothing more.

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