Factors affecting application developers’ loyalty to mobile platforms

• Mobile platform providers have become central players in the mobile ecosystem.
• Satisfaction is an antecedent of app developers’ loyalty to a mobile platform.
• The quality of SDK is an important determinant of satisfaction and credibility.

Mobile platform providers, including Apple and Google, have grown quickly to become central players in the mobile ecosystem. They now act as gatekeepers of information among multiple niche players in the mobile ecosystem. Many players from different industry sectors have tried to build their ecosystem centered on their own mobile platform, but only a few have succeeded so far. In the so called ‘ecosystem war’, one of the key issues for platform providers is how to retain a sustainable relationship with other niche players in the ecosystem. This paper investigates the factors influencing application developers’ loyalty to mobile platforms. To do this, this paper develops a model with key variables based on loyalty theory and adds variables that reflect the specific context of mobile platforms. The empirical analysis that was conducted in South Korea shows that satisfaction is a direct antecedent of application developers’ loyalty to a mobile platform. The results also show that the quality of a mobile platform’s software development kit (SDK) is one of the important determinants of application developers’ satisfaction with a particular mobile platform and also of the platform’s credibility. However, there is no significant relationship between the credibility and loyalty, which is not consistent with previous studies in different research settings. This provides us a clue to understand how the mobile platform market works and that mobile platform providers have less incentive to create a fair relationship with developers when they have a large customer base.