Standardisation strategies for the android platform: The politics of the stack

The mobile device landscape has changed forever with the advent of a truly successful open source mobile platform: Android. This paper illustrates how Android has redefined bargaining relationships within the mobile platform industry. Despite the stated open source nature of Android, many companies have difficulty influencing the direction of the platform. Android, however, can be viewed as supply chains of software, formed from the many open source projects Google integrate to produce Android. This paper identifies leverage points within this supply chain and concludes with an examination of the standardisation strategies companies may use to influence Android.