oDesk, a leading outsourcing marketplace for tech jobs, has announced that the demand for iPhone developers has skyrocketed by 500% in the six months since April 2008 – a six-times increase. Further, a job trends graph from job search site Indeed.com shows the number of iPhone related job postings going through the roof!
None of this should be surprising, however, given that the first beta version of the iPhone SDK was released on March 6, 2008 – roughly the point where the graph above starts to race upwards.
Still a Young Industry
Despite the increases, iPhone development is still a very young sector. Even with a large market of 13 million users, larger companies are being typically slow to get in on the action. Comparing the number of iPhone related development jobs to those for Rails developers (a semi-popular, but reasonably niche, Web application framework) shows how nascent the industry is:
Making Your Mark As a Developer – It’s a Bit Like The Rails Scene Was..
If you’re an iPhone developer who’s looking to be hired, don’t sell yourself short. While the number of jobs is still small, it’s going up all the time, despite the economic crisis. The iPhone has a large client market, but still a relatively small number of developers – so the interest should only continue to grow over the next several months.
As we saw in the Rails industry at a similar stage in its growth, this means that the few developers currently plugging away at building their identity and becoming “gurus” in the field will be able to command significantly-above-market rates now and into the future. If you want to make a mark (and some serious money!) in a new area, the iPhone development sector is the best place to do it right now – get blogging, get working, and start building up that personal brand for yourself.
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