Appealing to Internet-based freelance developers in smartphone application marketplaces

The success of the iPhone has created the smartphone application marketplace as a new business model for freelance developers, with significant potential yields. Attracting and retaining these freelance developers is an important success factor for smartphone platform owners. Therefore, using the viewpoint of freelance developers, this study adopts a discovery-oriented approach to explore antecedents of intentions to maintain a relationship with an incumbent platform. In a relationship commitment sense, freelance developers sustain incumbent relationships because of their calculative and affective commitments. Interview data further suggest that monetary rewards, potential market demand, and switching costs relate to calculative commitment; perceived service quality, identification with the platform owner, and intrinsic rewards are antecedents of affective commitment. The findings from the literature review and field research together produce an integrative framework that offers key insights for the smartphone application market, which can help central actors understand how to retain their external partners.