Mobile application market: A developer’s perspective

Major software companies, such as Apple and Google, are disturbing the relatively safe and established actors of the mobile application business. These newcomers have caused significant structural changes in the market by imposing and enforcing their own rules for the future of mobile application developments. The implications of these changes do not only concern the mobile network operators and mobile phone manufacturers but also bring additional opportunities and constraints for current mobile application developers. Therefore, developers need to assess what their options are and how they can take advantage of these current trends. In this paper, we take a developer’s perspective in order to explore how the identified trends will impact the mobile application development markets. Our preliminary analysis leads us to suggest eight propositions which summarize our findings and can be the starting points for future empirical research.