The Progressive Policy Institute has published its 2023 App Economy Report for Australia, updated every two years, showing the economic opportunities tied to the iOS (and Android) app economy and its continued growth.

Earlier today, the Progressive Polity Institute released two App Economy Reports, with one for Vietnam, and the other one of more relevance to local readers, the report for Australia.

The full 8 page report can be downloaded here, but what are the stats, facts and figures that show how the Australian App Economy has grown, and its importance to the Australian economy?

The report’s introduction starts off by looking at the future of the global App Economy and notes “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.”

The introduction continues noting: “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.”

Noting the importance of Australia as a “key player in the evolving global App Economy”, the report looks at Australian-based app developers with a strong global presence.

These include:

  • Sydney-based Canva, the online design and visual communication platform with more than 130 million monthly users across 190 countries.
  • There’s also Tasmania-based Savage Interactive, which in 2022 won an Apple Design Award for its art app Procreate, and Melbourne-based Studio Drydock which won for its game Wylde Flowers.
  • The report also highlights Gold Coast-based Desygner, known for its graphic design apps and brand management software, which has impressively amassed more than 20 million users worldwide.
  • Last to be highlighted in the introduction is Melbourne-based fintech app Afterpay, which was acquired in January 2022 by Square, is reported to still be “hiring extensively in Australia, based on its job postings.”

An obvious observation here is that AI will continue making big changes to the way we work, and could even supplant some apps, but we’re still in a very rich and thriving world of apps, and never has Apple’s terminology of “there’s an app for that” been more relevant or apt.

The report states the Australian App Economy is a potent source of future jobs, since “developing, updating, maintaining and securing mobile apps is becoming even more important.”

Of note is the fact “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”, with the Android Market (which later became Google Play) arrived not long after.

While there were apps during the Palm Pilot era, and there were apps for Nokia’s Symbian phones and Windows Pocket PCs, Apple’s creation of the App Store and Google’s copying of it set off a true explosion of quality, affordable mobile apps.

It was a golden age of app development that clearly continues to this day, with Apple alone having paid US $320 billion to developers to January 2023, having grown US $60 billion from the year before.

The report notes “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”, so we’ve already seen the dramatic impact the App Economy had during the time of the GFC.

The report continues, noting “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,” and again, it’s obviously this has gone exponentially since.

The top highlights from the report note that:

— In the future, individuals and businesses will become ever-more dependent on mobile apps for their daily lives and the Australian App Economy is a potent source of future jobs, since developing, updating, maintaining and securing mobile apps is becoming even more important.

— There are 174,000 jobs in the iOS ecosystem within Australia, a gain of 81% compared to 2017, while the jump to 166,000 Android jobs is a jump of 90% compared to the same timeframe.

— Jobs in the iOS ecosystem within Australia have increased 27% from 2021 to 2023 – the highest percentage increase shown between any years since the report was first published 2017.

The report, which you should read in full for yourself, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PPI-Austrailia-App-Economy.pdf concludes by stating: “Australia is well-placed to contribute to the next stage of the growing global App Economy. The current App Economy jobs are just the beginning.”