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Dr. Sami Hyrynsalmi
Date of doctoral defense: 19.12.2014
TUCS Department for the doctoral studies: University of Turku, Department of Information Technology
Admitted to TUCS GP on 15.1.2010
Graduate project title:
Letters from the War of Ecosystems — An Analysis of Independent Software Vendors in Mobile Application Marketplaces
Graduate project abstract:
The recent emergence of a new generation of mobile application marketplaces has changed the business in the mobile ecosystems. The marketplaces have gathered over a million applications by hundreds of thousands of application developers and publishers. Thus, software ecosystems — consisting of developers, consumers and the orchestrator — have emerged as a part of the mobile ecosystem.
This dissertation addresses the new challenges faced by mobile application developers in the new ecosystems through empirical methods. By using the theories of two-sided markets and business ecosystems as the basis, the thesis assesses monetization
and value creation in the market as well as the impact of electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and developer multihoming — i.e. contributing for more than one platform — in the ecosystems. The data for the study was collected with web crawling from the three biggest marketplaces: Apple App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone Store.
The results of the studies show a gap in monetization among the studied applications, while a majority of applications are produced by small or micro-enterprises. We finds only weak support for the impact of eWOM on the sales of an application in the studied ecosystem. Finally, the study reveals a clear difference in the multi-homing rates between the top application developers and the rest. This has an impact on the future market analyses—it seems that the smart device market can sustain several parallel application marketplaces.
Former supervisors:
Ville Harkke (University of Turku, Turku School of Economics)
Timo Knuutila, University of Turku, BID Technology
Ville Leppänen (University of Turku, Department of Information Technology)
Latest publications:
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