Quote:
Originally Posted by serkol 
20 app categories. You need to be in the top 100 in a category to make a living from the App Store (I'm an app developer, I'm usually in the top 100, so I base this assumption on my personal experience). If we ignore the fact that one programmer can make several apps (I used to have 5 apps once), and sometimes several people make one app, we will have 20 x 100 = 2000. Ok, let's multiply this by 10, and we'll have 20k. This should include the Apple stuff who "test" the apps and writes the server code and so on, because they are paid from the Apple's 30% cut, and as Apple said that's a break-even business for them. How on earth did they come out with 466k? That's beyond me.
20 app categories. You need to be in the top 100 in a category to make a living from the App Store (I'm an app developer, I'm usually in the top 100, so I base this assumption on my personal experience). If we ignore the fact that one programmer can make several apps (I used to have 5 apps once), and sometimes several people make one app, we will have 20 x 100 = 2000. Ok, let's multiply this by 10, and we'll have 20k. This should include the Apple stuff who "test" the apps and writes the server code and so on, because they are paid from the Apple's 30% cut, and as Apple said that's a break-even business for them. How on earth did they come out with 466k? That's beyond me.
According to Apple's numbers they paid out $2 billion to developers last year. If the top 100,000 got most of the money, that's an average of around $20,000 each. Some must have gotten more and made a good living, and some must have just augmented other income. But it's still a lot of jobs, and obviously much more than your initial estimate of 2,000. And this estimate doesn't include any Apple employees, which I assume would be included in the 43,000 US employee number perviously reported.
