Once upon a time everyone who wanted to make it big dreamed of being a movie star. That’s where the money was, after all — a big director liked your headshot, you auditioned, were cast, and suddenly you were rich and famous … or at least that’s how the fantasy went. Today’s aspiring young minds have a different dream, and the field in which one can strike it richest might surprise you.

The film industry realized earlier this year, with much chagrin, that the apps economy is bigger than Hollywood, and trends are showing the gap widening more and more each year. This disparity may surprise many outside of the tech world, but anyone who follows technology will likely just nods and say, “of course”. The technology sector is the fastest growing and one of the biggest in the world, outpacing other traditionally rich verticals like sports and entertainment. For all its fame and the fact that it practically owns a day of the week, the NFL is only a $12 billion a year industry. That’s nothing more than a bad quarter for a tech giant like Apple.

As for the tech economy specifically, the mobile app has become a ubiquitous part of conducting business and also of human social and consumptive behavior. Every company has convinced themselves that they need an app, and the explosion of business-facing app technology has helped companies like PayPal, Tim Hortons, and even Disney make it even easier to interact and deal with consumers.

As an app designer, your success will directly relate to your understanding of the marketplace, and what better way to corner the market than by partnering with a team that has already successfully marketed thousands of apps? The App Store and Google Play are the top marketplaces for the app business and a top-rate development company will be intimately familiar with how they operate. How do you know if the market wants your app? Mobile app development companies like Toronto’s Clearbridge Mobile have done business with hundreds of companies including Fortune 500 giants like Microsoft and The New York Times, and they have developed hundreds of thousands of apps. Partnering with an app development company gives you access to their acumen and experience and allows you to reach the best possible base of potential customers.

The connected world is coming sooner than you might think. Smart app studios like Clearbridge Mobile are already hard at work implementing the kind of app technology that will allow consumers to tap into this new era of connected cars, intelligent refrigerators and televisions that act as hubs of entire smart homes.

This cross-device development that development companies are already working on can loosely fit into the “Internet of Things”, a moniker that has come to describe any connected device that is not a computer, smartphone or tablet, which includes wearables, smart home devices (such as thermostats), connected televisions, ecommerce and retail, intelligent infrastructure (“smart cities”), health and fitness and industrial/agricultural equipment.

Whether you are looking to design an app that will lead the IoT charge, or you simply want to put retail companies in better contact with their customers, you can find help developing mobile apps with Clearbridge Mobile, a forward-thinking, disruptive mobile app team. After all, they can help you navigate the tricky tech terrain and get your app to market sooner and with better results than you could do alone.