Mobile Application Ecosystems: An Analysis of Android Ecosystem

A clear indication of the change in the software application business has been seen in the emergence of new mobile device related ecosystems. We have seen these new mobile application ecosystems, such as Google’s Android ecosystem and Apple’s ecosystem, having had significant success in getting existing software companies as well as new start-up ventures to offer software products and services within them. New, young ecosystems, such as Microsoft’s Windows Phone ecosystem, are also currently growing and the competition between the ecosystems will most likely increase in the near future. Motivated by the changes in software product business, we focus on analysing the Android application ecosystem, its developers and users. Although noting that this constitutes just a small portion of the whole software business, the data gathered from the ecosystem might uncover different modes of business within these new software product markets. Furthermore, by analysing the structure of the marketplace we can create a significant insight to the ‘health’ of the ecosystem. Mobile applications stores have been recently researched from different angles, e.g. the factors of Apple’s iPhone success (West & Mace, 2010; Laugesen & Yuan, 2010), the supply chain of the phones (Dedrick et al., 2011), a developer’s perspective (Anvaari & Jansen, 2010; Holzer & Ondrus, 2011; Schultz et al., 2011; Hyrynsalmi et al., 2012b), the multi-homing of developers and applications (Idu et al., 2011; Hyrynsalmi et al., 2012a, Hyrynsalmi, 2014), ecosystem’s content (Feijóo et al., 2009a; 2009b), value network approach (Peppard & Rylander, 2006), overall framework (Yamakami, 2010) and from a business strategy approach (Zhang & Liang, 2011) have been assessed previously. Although there is a considerable amount of existing research, the overall picture into the new marketplaces is scattered and built upon conceptual studies as well as empirical studies with a considerable small amount of data. Furthermore, some issues such as the monetization of products in mobile application ecosystems have not been studied, to the authors’ knowledge, before. Therefore further empirical studies with representative samples are needed to advance our understanding in the new marketplaces. In this paper we are presenting an introductory analysis of the Android ecosystem1. The ecosystem was chosen due to the variety of data that it offers. The aim of the study is to recognize information gaps of a mobile application ecosystem beliefs and ecosystems seen in practice. We assess these objectives by Mobile Application Ecosystems: An Analysis of Android Ecosystem