Motivational profiles of toolkit users – iPhone and Android developers
Birgitta Bergvall Kareborn, Michael Björn, Didier Chincholle · International Journal of Technology Marketing · 2011
Toolkits for development and distribution of mobile applications can potentially influence the ecosystem for mobile services. While these toolkits began to surface in the late 1990s, it was not until 2008, when Apple launched its App Store, that their potential became more visible. For these toolkits to create value to all the different stakeholders, we need to understand these innovation milieus and their inhabitants, areas that are becoming increasingly important yet under-researched in the literature. In this paper, we address the questions of who the pioneering users of the Apple and Android owned toolkits are, what attracted them to the mobile application market, and what affected their choice of platform for mobile application development. Emerging from the analysis are four different developer profiles of early adopters of the Android and iPhone platforms.