Report: Demand for mobile app developers far outstrips supply

Both large corporations and startups across a host of verticals are looking to bolster their rosters with mobile engineers, but so few developers boast the skills and experience necessary to create mobile applications that companies are instead forced to meet demand by increasing wages, retraining staff engineers, outsourcing work to third-party developers and setting up offshore development labs, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to the WSJ, the mobile application ecosystem is still so relatively new that few software developers have accumulated experience writing for smartphones--at the same time, online job listings search engine Indeed Inc. reports that the number of job postings with the keyword "iPhone" has tripled over the last year, and listings with the keyword "Android" have quadrupled. In addition, freelancer website Elance.com states that mobile development gigs doubled between Q1 2010 and Q1 2011, twice as fast as growth across the site as a whole.

The Wall Street Journal states that different companies are taking different approaches to solving the problem: Social networking startup Ning is mounting recruitment drives on more than a dozen college campuses and holds recruitment drives open to the public, while Hearst Magazines launched an "app lab" to coordinate mobile efforts across publications, hiring two mobile developers with relatively little experience and paying them salaries comparable to what it pays engineers with as much as a decade on the job. Tech job board Dice.com reports that as of fall 2010, the average mobile salary was about $76,000, but several companies said experienced mobile developers can fetch anywhere from $90,000 to $150,000 annually. 

For more:
- read this Wall Street Journal article

Related articles:
Tech firm finds dearth of qualified mobile developers
IBM survey: Mobile app projects to surpass rival platforms in 2011