PLATFORM CHOICE BY MOBILE APPS DEVELOPERS∗

For the past two years, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems have split the market share of smartphone devices and the mobile applications (apps) for those devices. We model and estimate the platform choice by mobile app developers, including the decision to multihome. Our model flexibly models the potential gap between the decision to multihome and the realized demand from that decision. We find far less difference in preferences across platforms than across types of developers and apps. We identify strong incentives for developers of the most popular apps to multihome, making tipping unlikely.

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