Design Options of Store-Oriented Software Ecosystems: An Investigation of Business Decisions

Nowadays companies like Apple create ecosystems of third-party providers and users around their software platforms. Often online stores like Apple App Store are created to directly market third-party solutions. We call such ecosystems store-oriented software ecosystems. While the architecture of these ecosystems is mainly derived from business decisions of their owners, ecosystems with greatly different architectural designs have been created. This diversity makes it challenging for future ecosystem providers to understand which architectural design is suitable to fulfill certain business decisions. In turn, opening a platform becomes risky while endangering intellectual property or scarifying quality of services. In this paper, we identify three main design options of store-oriented software ecosystems by classifying existing ecosystems based on similarities in their business decisions. We elaborate on the design options, discuss their main contributions, and provide exemplary ecosystems. Our work provides aspiring ecosystem providers with the reusable knowledge of existing ecosystems and helps them to take more informed architectural decisions and reduce risks in future.