App ecologies: Mapping apps and their support networks

App ecologies: Mapping apps and their support networksCarolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Fernando van der Vlist, and Esther Weltevrede

AoIR 2016 Berlin: "Internet Rules!", 5–8 October 2016, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

University of Siegen / University of Amsterdam

Intersecting app & platform studies

Move beyond studying apps from a single medium perspective.

Intricate relation between apps and platforms: platform incentive developers to build on top of their data and features.

Aim: understand apps as relational and situated software entities.

Creating the conditions for app development

Characteristics of social media platforms (1) programmability (Bogost & Montfort

2009; Helmond 2015)

(2) affordances & constraints (Langlois & Elmer 2013)

(3) involvement of heterogeneous stakeholders (Gillespie 2010).

Developers realise the programmability and interpretative flexibility (Bijker & Pinch 1987) of platforms.

Making engagement with platforms visible

How do developers engage with platform data & features? How do they recombine, expand, reinterpret and twist it?

What relations between platforms and apps emerge?

New method repurposes app stores to identify and map apps built on top of or in relation to platforms.

Method: App store as starting point

Method: Identifying apps and similar apps

Method: Emergent categorisation using the self-description of apps

Types of relating to platforms

1. Popularity growth and strategic engagement

2. Enhancing platform functions

3. Adding functionalities

Facebook sunburst

Twitter sunburst

Zoom: 100%

2. Sharing, Scheduling, ...

3. Content Downloading

4. Cameras, Editors, ...

Facebook alt. clients

Zoom: 100%

2. Content Sharing

3. App Customisation

4. Content Downloading

Twitter alt. clients

Instagram sunburst

1. Editor

3.Manager

4. MonitorZoom: 100%

Instagram added functionalities

Snapchat sunburst

1. Editor

2. Functionality

3. FriendsZoom: 100%

Snapchat guides

Conditions for app development

Implications of API politics

Few alternative clients or readers (Instagram and Snapchat)

Few content aggregation or search-related apps

Relative absence of automated or bot-related apps (Twitter)

Negotiating openness & closure

Platforms create the conditions within which app development on top of their data can take place.

API politics (cf. Bucher 2013) as central means to regulate openness and closure of the platform’s interpretative flexibility.

Negotiation involves a variety of stakeholders (platforms, developers, users).

From platform politics to stakeholder politics

Stakeholder politics: how developers twist and tweak platform data and features to make them fit their own objectives and valuation regimes.

Intersects developers - platform - users.

Understanding stakeholder politics contributes to both app and platform studies - allows to study apps as situated software & platforms as open/closed.