Elsevier

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume 111, January 2016, Pages 119-127
Journal of Systems and Software

The influence of developer multi-homing on competition between software ecosystems

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.08.053Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Developers multi-home by offering apps in competing mobile application ecosystems.

  • If developers multi-home, several competing ecosystems can survive.

  • We analyzed multi-homing in three mobile application ecosystems with 1.3 million apps.

  • 3% of developers generate 80% of installations in a marketplace.

  • The majority of all apps single-home, but the most popular apps multi-home.

Abstract

Having a large number of applications in the marketplace is considered a critical success factor for software ecosystems. The number of applications has been claimed to determine which ecosystems holds the greatest competitive advantage and will eventually dominate the market. This paper investigates the influence of developer multi-homing (i.e., participating in more than one ecosystem) in three leading mobile application ecosystems. Our results show that when regarded as a whole, mobile application ecosystems are single-homing markets. The results further show that 3% of all developers generate more than 80% of installed applications and that multi-homing is common among these developers. Finally, we demonstrate that the most installed content actually comprises only a small number of the potential value propositions. The results thus imply that attracting and maintaining developers of superstar applications is more critical for the survival of a mobile application ecosystem than the overall number of developers and applications. Hence, the mobile ecosystem is unlikely to become a monopoly. Since exclusive contracts between application developers and mobile application ecosystems are rare, multi-homing is a viable component of risk management and a publishing strategy. The study advances the theoretical understanding of the influence of multi-homing on competition in software ecosystems.

Keywords

Software ecosystem
Multi-homing
Two-sided markets

Cited by (0)

Sami Hyrynsalmi is a nerd who has always enjoyed working with programming and computers. After graduating as Master of Science in Technology in software engineering from University of Turku in 2009, he decided to focus on the real issues and started his doctoral dissertation work on mobile application ecosystems. After successfully defending his thesis in 2014, he has focused on various themes from software security to business ecosystems.

Arho Suominen is Senior Scientist at the Innovations, Economy, and Policy unit at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. His research focuses on qualitative and quantitative assessment of emerging technologies and innovation management. He has published work in several journals such as Scientometrics, Journal of Systems and Software, and Futures.

Matti Mäntymäki is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral researcher at Turku School of Economics, Finland. He holds a D.Sc. (Econ. & Bus. Adm) in information systems science. His research has been published in outlets such as International Journal of Information Management, Computers in Human Behavior and Behavior & Information Technology.