Differentation within mobile ecosystems - The unspecialized marketplaces

Nowadays, the 'war of ecosystems' between alliances of giant mobile operating system vendors and mobile phone manufacturers is a popular topic in the news. In the public discussion, the application ecosystem emerged inside the mobile ecosystem is argued to be a key in the differentiation. This has striven the ecosystem orchestrators for recruiting an increasing number of software developers and applications to join in their ecosystem. In this paper, we study how different mobile ecosystems differentiate both in application offering and in the mobile phone users. We use the information gathered from over 800 000 applications and the questionnaire answered by approximately 2 000 university students to study the research questions. The results show that the ecosystems are rather similar in their offering although it is possible to make distinction between the users of different ecosystems