Strategizing in digital application marketplaces

Abstract

Digital application marketplaces have become an important strategizing device for many product developing firms. However, creating and sustaining digital application marketplaces are challenging tasks and only little empirical evidence exists about the role and nature of strategy for these marketplaces and how such strategizing actually unfolds in practice. Drawing on a case study of Apple’s App Store, we applied a strategy-as-process perspective to investigate the role of a digital application marketplace in the development of a digital platform. Our analysis identifies and describes three different strategies in the App Store case: monetizing, governing and enhancing, and demonstrates how they were enacted proactively or reactively to support the development of the platform.