Apple Says It Has Created 1 Million Jobs, App Store Is Going Gangbusters

Apple announced Thursday that more than 1 million jobs have been directly or indirectly created by the company in the United States alone, and that its 6-year-old App Store experienced its biggest day ever Jan. 1.

The jobs include Apple’s own employees as well as app developers, suppliers and manufacturers across the country. More than 9,000 jobs were added to Apple’s payroll in 2014, which the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant said represents a sixfold increase over the past decade. As of the close of 2014, Apple employed 72,800 permanent full-time employees and had 437 retail stores in 15 countries.

The App Store’s milestone comes on the heels of a record-breaking year, as apps created more than $10 billion in revenue for developers. The company said much of that success was helped by the introduction of iOS8, an operating system that helps app developers add new and innovative features. To date, the store’s developers have earned a cumulative $25 billion from the sale of apps and games.

“This year is off to a tremendous start after a record-breaking year for the App Store and our developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services. “We’re so proud of the creativity and innovation developers bring to the apps they create for iOS users and that the developer community has now earned over $25 billion.”

Apple said more than 41,000 jobs related to the company’s new headquarters will be created in Santa Clara County by the time the spaceship-shaped building is completed, reportedly sometime in late 2016.

The tech giant announced that 1,027,000 jobs were “created or supported by Apple” in the U.S. and that 627,000 positions can be attributed to the iOS ecosystem. Apple also announced that 334,000 jobs have been created at other companies due to Apple’s dramatic growth.

One of the beneficiaries of the App Store’s success is Caroline Hu Flexer, whose educational-game company, Duck Duck Moose, has grown from three people to a staff of 20 who now have 21 different apps under their belts.

“Our whole business is based on the App Store, and the growth we’ve seen because of that has been amazing,” Flexer said. “It’s a whole new economy, and there’s no way a small company like ours could have had such success with their apps competing against the big media companies without the App Store’s distribution.”

The first week of January set a record for billings from the App Store, with customers around the world spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases, and Jan. 1 marked the single-biggest day ever in App Store sales history.

As of November, Apple was both the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization and the first U.S. company to be valued at over $700 billion.

This article appeared in print in the January 9th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.