The App Ecosystem Weekly For 10/5/12

It’s October 5th, 2012, and welcome to this week’s issue of The App Ecosystem Weekly. This week we’re going to discuss changes to the iOS App Store rules around app promotion, Google’s mistakes in marketing the Jelly Bean Android update, the five US states with the greatest impact on the app ecosystem. If you’re new to Kinvey’s App Ecosystem Weekly, you can follow us on Twitter here or subscribe via RSS here. We publish weekly roundups of the most interesting and thought provoking stories around the app ecosystem, app development, and the rest of the mobile world.

App Economy Creates 519,000 jobs, Chiefly in 5 States
A study released this week by CTIA and their partners showed the number of developers and related professionals working in various elements of the app ecosystem in the United States, and segmented by state. By their count, over half a million people in the United States are employed either directly or indirectly by the app ecosystem, where indirectly employed people are providing services or tools to developers or marketers directly in the app ecosystem.

This report also marked the economic impact of the states most involved in app development, and noted that in six states, app development is a billion-dollar or larger industry. Those six states are California, Washington, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, all states with a history of high tech industry and strong growth. Since the app world began to really grow just four years ago, it has grown from almost inconsequential size to an industry with half a million employees and almost 2.5 million applications across many platforms.

Jelly Bean: It’s Not Everywhere, And What Features Does It Offer?
This Forbes article points out how strangely positioned Android 4.0 Jelly Bean has been since its announcement and release. While it’s full of new features and enhancements and has been available for months, very few phones have received the update and most Android phones being sold today are expected to never receive it. At the same time, Google is barely promoting the new features of Jelly Bean online – As the writer suggests, this might be an effort to not draw attention to the fact that Jelly Bean isn’t available for most Android owners and Google can’t predict when it will be since their carrier partners control distribution. You can read the article for the full detail, but the article’s major question is to push on why Google does such a poor job of marketing and explaining their own ecosystem and software updates. “What is the Google counterpart to iCloud as a marketing concept? I can’t find it.”

What Is Apple Actually Trying To Stop With Their Rules Update?
Lastly, Dan Rowinski at ReadWriteWeb had an excellent post this morning debunking the uncertainty around why Apple suddenly amended their App Store rules to eliminate apps that promote other apps as their main functionality. Dan wrote an excellent article that we won’t summarize, but you can get the full details here.

That’s this week’s App Ecosystem Update, covering mobile technologies, app development, and trends & events in the space. Please follow us on Twitter, subscribe via RSS, and stay tuned for future updates from the Kinvey team!