Abstract
With the fast growth in smart phones, tablets and apps markets, the competition is increasing between market platform such as Android and iOS. And the growth numbers of apps available and downloaded, the competition between app market platforms are also very intensive. The economic behaviours of participants are determined by market factors, such as the effects of the number of apps available in the market and the number of users purchasing mobile platform devices and download apps. In this research, we analyse the pricing issues (subscription fee and revenue sharing ratio) in apps market under the scenarios of monopolistic and duopolistic apps markets.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the fast growth in smart phones, tablets and apps markets, the competition is increasing between Android and iOS. According to comScore Reports (source: comScore), the top smart phone operating system in the United States was Android with 52.2% of all smart phone owners, while Apple’s iOS was the second most common smart phone operating system with 40.6% of the market. BlackBerry OS ranked third with 3.6 percent share, followed by Microsoft with 3.2% share and Symbian with 0.2 percent of the market. IDC reports that, in 2013, 1,004.2 million smart phones were sold worldwide and a sale of smart phone in Q4 2013 is 284.4 million (source: IDC). The growth number of apps and the number of downloads of apps are also very impressive. App Store is the official Apple online app distribution system for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, and Google Play (Android Market) is a digital application distribution platform for Android operated by Google. Both Google Play and App Store launched in 2008. In July 2013, there were more than 1,000,000 apps available for Android, and the estimated number of apps downloaded from Google Play was 50 billion (source: www.androidanalyse.com).
4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
In this paper, utilizing the methodologies of game theoretic and economic modelling, we analyze the platform subscription fee under the structures of the monopolistic and duopolistic apps market platforms. In monopolistic apps market, we find that the apps market platform subscription fee decrease with the number of apps providers. In duopolistic apps market, the apps market platform subscription fee increases with the market share of apps users.
