Mobile Privacy and Business-to-Platform Dependencies: An Analysis of SEC Disclosures

This Article systematically examines the dependence of mobile apps on mobile platforms for the collection and use of personal information through an analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings of mobile app companies. The Article uses these disclosures to find systematic evidence of how app business models are shaped by the governance of user data by mobile platforms, in order to reflect on the role of platforms in privacy regulation more generally. The analysis of SEC filings documented in the Article produces new and unique insights into the data practices and data-related aspects of the business models of popular mobile apps and shows the value of SEC filings for privacy law and policy research more generally. The discussion of SEC filings and privacy builds on regulatory developments in SEC disclosures and cybersecurity of the last decade. The Article also connects to recent regulatory developments in the U.S. and Europe, including the General Data Protection Regulation, the proposals for a new ePrivacy Regulation and a Regulation of fairness in business-to-platform relations

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Measuring third party tracker power across web and mobile

Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition regulators. Traditional measures of market share, based on revenue or sales, fail to represent the tracking capability of a tracker, especially if it spans both web and mobile. This paper proposes a new approach to measure the concentration of tracking capability, based on the reach of a tracker on popular websites and apps. Our results reveal that tracker prominence and parent-subsidiary relationships have significant impact on accurately measuring concentration

Third-Party SDKs and Mobile App Performance

To create attractive mobile apps in the competitive mobile market, developers are increasingly leveraging third-party software development kits (SDKs) in app development. However, little is known about how using third-party toolkits affects app performance. Drawing on the platform literature and the boundary object theory, we conceptualize third-party SDK utilization as a boundary-spanning activity. Based on this, we theorize its impact on app performance, considering the mobile platform and app developers as contextual factors. We examine the causal influence of third-party SDKs on app performance by conducting difference-in-difference-style analyses on a longitudinal dataset of mobile apps released on the Apple App Store and Google Play. We find empirical evidence supporting our theoretical conjectures that utilizing more third-party SDKs increases active users. More interestingly, platform updates and developer platform-specific experience attenuate this positive impact. This study contributes to the platform-based innovation and governance literature and provides managerial implications in mobile domains

Essays on Business Value Creation in Digital Platform Ecosystems

Digital platforms and the surrounding ecosystems have garnered great interest from researchers and practitioners. Notwithstanding this attention, it remains unclear how and when digital platforms create business value for platform owners and complementors. This three-essay dissertation focuses on understanding business value creation in digital platform ecosystems. The first essay reviews and synthesizes literature across disciplines and offers an integrative framework of digital platform business value. Advised by the findings from the review, the second and third essays focus on the value creation for platform complementors. The second essay examines how IT startups entering a platform ecosystem at different times can strategically design their products (i.e., product diversification across platform architectural layers and product differentiation) to gain competitive advantages. Longitudinal evidence from the Hadoop ecosystem demonstrates that product diversification has an inverted U-shaped relationship with complementors success, and such an effect is more salient for earlier entrants than later entrants. Earlier entrants should develop products that are similar to other ecosystem competitors to reduce uncertainty whereas later entrants are advised to explore market niche and differentiate their products.The third essay investigates how platform complementors strategies and products co-evolve over time in the co-created ecosystem network environment. Our longitudinal analysis of the Hadoop ecosystem indicates that complementors technological architecture coverage and alliance exploration strategies increase their product evolution rate. In turn, complementors with faster product evolution are more likely to explore new partners but less likely to cover a wider range of the focal platforms technological layers in subsequent periods. Network density, co-created by all platform complementors, weakens the effects of complementors strategies on their product evolution but amplifies the effects of past product evolutions on strategies.This three-essay dissertation uncovers various understudied competitive strategies in the digital platform context and enriches our understanding of business value creation in digital platform ecosystems

The Challenges of Designing Digital Services for Multiple Mobile Platforms

The value of digital services is increasingly recognized by owners of digital platforms. These services have central role in building and sustaining the business of the digital platform. In order to sustain the design of digital services, owners of digital platforms encourage third-party developers to tap into and join the digital ecosystem. However, while there is an emerging literature on designing digital services, little empirical evidence exists about challenges faced by third-party developers while designing digital services, and in particular for multiple mobile platforms. Drawing on a multiple case study of three mobile application development firms from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we synthesize the digital service design taxonomy to understand the challenges faced by third-party developers. Our study identifies a set of challenges in four different levels: user level, platform level, distribution level and ecosystem level. The identified challenges are then illustrated by different design dimensions. For each challenge, we identified set of factors and classified them under three objectives: business, interaction and technology. In doing this, our research extends and complements existing digital service literature and contributes new knowledge about the design of digital services

Fostering innovation: Factors that attract and retain third party developers in mobile ecosystems

The popularity of smartphones and the related growth of mobile application markets created a need for mobile platform owners to open their software platforms up to third party developers in order to meet user demand for mobile applications. This external innovation provides a tremendous opportunity for mobile platform owners to develop a volume and diversity of products they could not develop in-house, but it also presents challenges in attracting a sufficient number of developers and users in order to harness the two-sided and same-sided network effects required to successfully cultivate a robust mobile ecosystem. The main objective of this study is to investigate the factors which attract and retain third party developers in mobile ecosystems, a topic about which limited study has been conducted to date. To achieve this goal we developed a research framework based on theoretical and industry literature related to the mobile industry. Using this as a basis for our research we interviewed developers for the iOS, Android and Windows Phone platforms as well as an independent expert specialising in research of the telecommunications industry. These interviews provide a list of factors relating to what motivates third party developers to select a particular ecosystem. Factors are presented in terms of economic considerations, the boundary resources within the mobile platforms, the related development community and the reach the ecosystem provides. These factors are detailed and compared concluding that monetary reward, user engagement and market share are the most dominant factors influencing developer choice. This research complements and extends existing research on third party developer motivation in competitive open innovation communities as well as providing insights into the industry for prospective mobile developers