Platform Adoption by Mobile Application Developers: A Multimethodological Approach

This paper investigates the factors that influence the adoption of IT platforms by software developers and how those factors differ from those that influence IT adoption by end-users. We take a multi-methodological approach, beginning with an interpretive field study where we interview mobile application developers. In the initial interpretive phase, we identify a comprehensive set of influences on developers\u27 platform adoption, comparing them with the factors that have been identified in previous studies of end-user adoption, noting key differences. In the second phase, we empirically test the factors identified in our interviews. We find several key differences between end-user adoption of IT and developer adoption of IT platforms. Most notably, we observe the importance of network externality considerations when developers make an adoption decision, a consideration that is largely absent for end-users. Our study is among the first to comment on B2B and B2C issues in the adoption phenomenon where developers adopt a platform as technology producers (a B2B consideration) in order to ultimately provide mobile applications to end-users who are technology consumers (a B2C consideration)