The Emerging Application Ecosystems

Abstract

Emerging mobile application ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software business. Apple App Store and Google Play have gathered both existing large software companies and new start-ups. In creating a healthy ecosystem, the role of the software developer is significant. In practice, 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. This article empirically investigates Google Play, by gathering the data of 350,000 applications from the marketplace. With the dataset, common assumptions linked to the marketplace are studied. The results show that the direct software sale is a practical revenue model only for a few while offering a trial and paid version of the application seems to improve the revenue. The impact of the number of applications in the marketplace is questioned.