ABSTRACT
Within a decade of the launch of the Apple App Store, the app economy had witnessed considerable growth worldwide. According to the market researcher App Annie (2016), the global app economy is projected to double in size to $101 billion by 2020. As ‘a platform for, and creature of, its applications’, the iPhone with its iOS operating system opened the chapter of adapting the mobile for the internet (Goggin, 2009, p. 233). As discussed in the previous chapter, this soon provoked an answer from a group of technology companies led by Google, which launched the Android Operating System (OS) through the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), by strategically adopting particular open source practices (Spreeuwenberg and Poell, 2012). It marked a gradual shift from value chains controlled by telecom operators and device manufacturers to value networks centring on OSs and apps (Goggin, 2011; Goldsmith, 2014).
