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Apple to open Europe’s first training centre for app developers

The story behind the story: Apple is always proud-and rightly so-of the robustness of its iOS economy, giving out impressive numbers during keynotes and earnings calls to show how well companies and developers are doing in the iOS App Store.

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In a release announcing the center, the company claimed its app ecosystem has already created 1.2 million jobs throughout the Continent. “Apple’s app ecosystem is the anchor for our business, and developing across Apple’s operating systems has enabled us to easily and quickly bring the Qurami experience to iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch users”.

This will be made possible via their own, internal curriculum and teachers as well as partner up with various developer training entities from Italy in order to gain as much ground as they can.

This move certainly follows from what Apple has done recently to make its iOS platform more accessible for developers. The said centre will be offering a curriculum that is created to train the next generation of app developers.

Apple’s new initiative also comes on the heels of a reported €318m (8m) payment to Italy’s tax office to settle accusations it hadn’t paid taxes in six years.

A year ago was great for both Google Play and Apple App Store, but for different reasons.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi hailed the planned centre as “an important experiment”, and said it would provide opportunities for more than 600 students. The company also announced that the highest amount of activity was recorded on New Year’s day, when approximately $144 million was spent on app purchases in roughly 24 hours.

As with previous year, games provided 75 percent of revenue in the iOS App Store, and 90 percent of revenue for Google Play.

Unfortunately for those in North America who would jump on this opportunity, the first App Development Center is being launched in Europe – Naples, to be exact. The company was the first to create jobs in the App department so the authorities couldn’t establish a tax before doing some research upon the new field of work.

Apple says its app store has created more than 1.4 million jobs in Europe.

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Apple earns 55 percent of its revenue outside the United States, and yet its foreign tax rate is a mere 1.8 percent, an arrangement that the European Commission insists is simply unacceptable. Meanwhile, BlackBerry accounted for six percent of jobs while Windows Phone represented nine percent.

Apple iOS Development Center