The Emerging Mobile Ecosystems: An Introductory Analysis of Android Market

Sami Hyrynsalmi, Arho Suominen, Tuomas Mäkilä, Timo Knuutila

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Emerging mobile ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software product business. Marketplaces such as Apple App Store and Google Android Market have gathered both existing large software companies and new start-ups. Furthermore, the competition of the ecosystem providers will increase in the near future. In creating a healthy ecosystem, the role of the software developer is significant. In practise, the ecosystems‟ ability to entice developers to create software products to the ecosystem can be argued to be a major factor driving the competitiveness of the ecosystem. By offering a platform that enables the developers to easily create software products, which can be easily monetized, makes the platform more approachable. In this paper, we investigate an emerging mobile ecosystem, Android Market, its developers and users by gathering the data of 339,861 applications from the marketplace. With the dataset, we study some common assumptions linked to the marketplace. The results show that the direct software sale to the customers is a practical revenue model only for a few developers. The impact of the size of a marketplace is questioned by the results. However, offering a trial and paid version of the application seems to improve the revenue. Furthermore, certain conventional assumptions of users' behaviour do not seem to hold.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe 21st International Conference on Management of Technology
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Publication typeA4 Article in conference proceedings

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