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There are promising career opportunities in apps – the services and tools built to run on smartphones, computer tablets and Facebook’s online social network – a new study from the US suggests.

The demand for applications for everything ranging from games to quantum physics has created 466,000 jobs in the US since 2007, according to a new analysis from technology trade group TechNet.

The estimate counts 311,000 jobs at companies making the apps and another 155,000 at local merchants who have expanded their workforce in an economic ripple effect caused by increased spending at their businesses.

The study suggests this so-called “app economy” is still in the early stages of a boom driven by the mobile computing and social networking crazes unleashed by Apple’s iPhone and Facebook.

“This is a telescope into what the future looks like,” said economist Michael Mandel, who put together the report. “This is one part of the economy that is actually expanding and hiring. Once you point people in that direction, they can realign their compass pretty quickly.”

App makers were creating jobs even when the overall US unemployment rate climbed as high as 10% in late 2009, Mr Mandel said. That bodes well for even more vigorous growth if the economy can extend a gradual recovery from recession.

The app economy began to gear up in 2007, the year that Apple introduced the iPhone and Facebook turned its website into a platform for other programmes designed for its rapidly growing audience.

Now there are more than 500,000 apps available for the iPhone and Apple’s iPad tablet. Some are given away free in an attempt to make money from ads, while others are sold by entrepreneurs or major companies.

As its audience has grown from about 58 million users in 2007 to the current 845 million, Facebook has hatched perhaps the most successful apps company so far in Zynga. The San Francisco-based maker of online games such as FarmVille and Words With Friends already employs about 2,800 people and has leased enough office space to hire thousands more over the next few years.

The seeds for even more job growth have been planted by a proliferation of other mobile devices designed to run on operating systems made by Google, Research in Motion and Microsoft. More apps are likely to be coming into homes as more TVs and appliances, including fridges and washing machines, are wired for internet access.