Our Work

Europe App Economy Update, 2021

• May 25, 2022
• Michael Mandel

In the second year of the pandemic, European App Economy jobs continued to grow. Looking at the largest countries where we have the most reliable data, France has an estimated 484,000 App Economy jobs as of December 2021, Germany has 504,000 App Economy jobs, and the United Kingdom has 558,000 App Economy jobs (table below).

We estimate that the 30-country total (the European Union plus United Kingdom, Norway, and Switzerland) is 3.034 million App Economy Jobs. That’s up 28% from a revised 2019 App Economy employment level of 2.378 million.  (For more information on the underlying methodology used for these estimates, see the appendix to “The App Economy in Europe: Leading Countries and Cities, 2017.” For details of the latest updated methodology, see section below. Note that the estimates in Table 1 are not directly comparable to previously published European country estimates for 2019 and 2020, which have been revised.)

Focusing on mobile operating systems, we estimate that 2.276 million European App Economy workers belong to the iOS ecosystem as of December 2021, up 28% from 2019’s revised numbers. We estimate that 2.486 million European App Economy workers belong to the Android ecosystem as of December 2021, also up 28% from 2019.

In other words, the App Economy has been a major source of job growth for the broader European economy during the pandemic. These App Economy jobs kept the economy going during the tough early months and then continuing to expand even as the pandemic moved into a new phase.

Some examples: Handelsblatt, Germany’s leading business and financial newspaper, is looking for an IOS developer as of early January 2022. TWT Digital Health in Heidelberg was looking for a mobile developer with iOS skills.  In Paris, Withings, a consumer electronics company building an ecosystem of connected devices and apps, was looking for an Android developer to help develop health-related applications.  In Bristol, UK, Dyson was hiring an iOS mobile developer. In London, Plum Fintech, a developer of personal savings assistants for consumers, was hiring an Android Engineer. In Barcelona, wefox, one of Europe’s largest insurance startups, was looking for an iOS developer.  In Valencia, Happÿdonia, a startup founded in 2018 that provides custom corporate social networks, was looking for an Android developer.

Looking at more recent App Economy job postings,  as of May 2022, Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, was looking for an iOS Mobile developer in Zaandam, just north of Amsterdam. ABN AMRO, a large bank, was looking for an Android developer in Amsterdam. In May 2022 the Italian software company Zucchetti posted a job opening for an IOS / Android developer in Perugia, in the Umbria region. MindTek, an app developer firm based in Bergamo, Italy, was looking for an iOS/Android mobile application developer.

In Göteborg, Sweden, the Volvo Group was advertising for an Android developer as of May 2022. Perigee was looking for an iOS developer in Malmö, Sweden, to help build apps that promote healthy habits. Electrolux was looking for an Android developer in Stockholm.  London-based WeAre8 was looking for an Android developer in its new R&D center in Thessaloniki, Greece, to help build a socially-minded digital ad platform.

Revisions and Updated Methodology

To better track App Economy jobs during the pandemic, we updated the methodology that was described in detail in the appendix to “The App Economy in Europe: Leading Countries and Cities, 2017.” The biggest change was to construct more timely estimates of the number of “information and communications technology (ICT) professionals” by country, which form an essential input into our estimation methodology.

In the past we had used the most recent available government data, which sometimes lagged by a year or more. That’s obviously not sufficient during the pandemic.  Instead, now we use a procedure that generate a current estimate of ICT professionals. We start with the most recent number of ICT professional employees, as reported by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).  For example, the ILO data gives us the 2020 figure for most European countries. Then we estimated a preliminary 2021 figure based on job growth in the “information and communications” industry sector as reported by Eurostat. The preliminary 2021 figure, in turn, will be revised when better data on ICT professionals is available. (The latest figures for the United Kingdom are drawn from the Annual Population Survey, “Information Technology and Telecommunications Professionals” as reported by Nomis).

Note that the shift from lagged to current data aligns the European estimates with the methodology we use to generate the U.S. App Economy estimates. Assuming the number of ICT professionals is growing, this shift will tend to raise the App Economy estimates. As a result, our revised estimates for 2019 are now typically higher than our previously published estimates.

On the other hand, the growth rate of information and communications sector employment is generally less than the growth rate of ICT professionals, so our updated methodology tends to produce a conservative estimate for App Economy job growth in the latest year. These growth estimates will then get revised up when new data is available. As a result, our revised estimates for 2020 are generally higher than our initial preliminary estimates done last year.

One final point: The new pandemic wave hitting Europe in December 2021 produced noisy job listing data for all but the largest countries. To get more reliable preliminary results, we also drew upon the “App Economy” share of job listings by country that we calculated in 2020. These results will be updated as additional data is available.