Journals Proceedings

Abstract

The application (apps) on smartphones exhibit many kinds of innovation. With the powerful features of Smartphones, people can easily access the internet, social networking, email, and instant messaging. The introduction of the App stores has broken the barriers of big investments in hardware and software for software development and made software development simple and easy with only a few people or even a single person doing the work and quickly reaching users directly around the world. These unique features of app innovation make us to explore whether the first-mover advantages exist in app development, and if the first-mover advantages can be sustained. This exploratory research reviewed literature about firstmover advantages in products, services, and e-commerce innovation. First-mover advantages often arise from sources as follows: technological leadership, resources preempting, switching costs, network externalities, and pricing advantages. With the objective to understand whether first-mover advantages exist in app innovation and how first movers sustain advantages, we collected data about top-ranked apps of different kinds and analyze their competitiveness and form findings about first mover’s situation in the app market.