1.66 Million Employed in App Industry; Perhaps 2.6 Million in Telecom Service Provider Industry

The U.S. app industry represents 1.66 million as of December 2015, according to the Progressive Policy Institute.

PPI includes among the firms employing those people large and small app developers; software and media companies; financial and retail companies; industrial companies; health and education enterprises; leading tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook; nonprofits and government suppliers; and large accounting and consulting firms.

Such employees have direct information technology jobs, non-IT jobs that support those jobs, or spillover local retail and restaurant jobs, construction jobs, and all the other necessary services.

Core app economy workers number about 550,000.

By way of comparison, there were an estimated 910,000 people directly employed in the core telecom industry in 2010, according to US Telecom.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were in December 2015 some 868,000 core service provider jobs. Using the same ratio of indirect jobs to direct jobs as for the app economy analysis, there might be 2.6 million people employed by the core telecommunications services industry.

                                    Estimates of App Economy Jobs

Date of estimate	Date of publication	App Economy jobs, thousands
Fall 2011	Feb. 2012	466
April 2012	October 2012	519
June 2013	July 2013	752
Dec. 2015         January 2016		1660
Data: South Mountain Economics, Progressive Policy Institute, The Conference Board, Indeed, BLS