Boundary Resources Dependency in Third-Party Development from the Developer’s Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to explore issues pertaining to the development of third-party applications aimed to be hosted at software platforms. While prior research has addressed design challenges in platform design, and suggested a boundary resources model to understand such design, we argue that the application developers’ perspective has not yet been scrutinized. Drawing on design experiences from application development for the Facebook platform, we suggest further elaboration of the boundary resources model for software platforms. Our results show that the developers and applications are highly affected by the unpredictability of software platforms. Based on an empirically justified account of experience with boundary resources dependencies, we propose a set of implications for third-party development as well as platform development and maintenance. The study should be helpful in determining the influence of boundary resources on third-party developers and applications whilst planning for application development on such platforms. It should also be useful to platform owners involved in the development and maintenance of boundary resources for third-party development.