Revenue models of application developers in android market ecosystem

Abstract

Mobile application ecosystems have growth rapidly in the past few years. Increasing number of startups and established developers are alike offering their products in different marketplaces such as Android Market and Apple App Store. In this paper, we are studying revenue models used in Android Market. For analysis, we gathered the data of 351,601 applications from their public pages at the marketplace. From these, a random sample of 100 applications was used in a qualitative study of revenue streams. The results indicate that a part of the marketplace can be explained with traditional models but free applications use complex revenue models. Basing on the qualitative analysis, we identified four general business strategy categories for further studies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.