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Apps represent the first truly global market for digital goods, which can in principle be produced anywhere, distributed at almost no cost, and consumed wherever there is a network connection. The low barriers to entry and scalability of digital products thus offer the alluring promise of more accessible economic opportunities, especially to those producers typically marginalized either by socioeconomic status, geographic location, or both. Yet the app market, like all markets, is a socially constructed system with policies, architectures, and intrinsic biases that govern participation and outcomes.
This research investigates these dynamics through a descriptive study of supply side participation, value capture, and international trade in the global app economy. It describes at multiple scales how the structures and market dynamics lead to highly skewed outcomes in participation and revenue, producing clear categories of winners and losers, and asks:
- Who is successfully making apps?
- Who is making money, and in what markets?
- How do the structure and design of the app stores affect value capture and trade?
The resulting analysis, based on an original dataset of top-ranked apps and their developers across 37 national markets, reveals how developer participation in the app economy is heavily skewed toward the largest and richest economies.
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